Is Lacrosse a Year-Round Game?

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These days I can’t figure out whether sports have seasons anymore. When I was a kid way back in the 60′s and 70′s there were definitely seasons for sports: Spring – baseball, Summer – finish baseball, then summer league basketball (outdoors on the blacktop), Fall – football, Winter – basketball. Some kids did swimming in the winter, but not in my neighborhood. I guess people have a greater need to “specialize” these days versus being an “all around” athlete. You don’t hear the phrase “four letter man” very much any more.

Where I grew up, Stratford, CT, there was no lacrosse. I am not exaggerating when I say it wasn’t available. It didn’t exist. I was in tune with all sports activities in town. I mentioned the major sports (above), but I even played pick-up hockey on a frozen pond at Long Brook Park, entered track meets, and played some organized tennis, so I was a versatile athlete — I would have noticed lacrosse, if it existed. Unfortunately it didn’t — our loss, but oh well, such is life.

So now, many years later, I am in Baltimore and my son will start indoor lacrosse next month. I don’t know if he will be playing with a club team, with guys from his school team (City College High School) or some combination. Last year we were down in Catonsville at the community college once a week and that seemed like a good workout for him at a nice facility. He got schooled in a few of those games by some kids with some serious skills. I think there may have been some college players mixed in with the high school guys. Its funny, a year ago he was content to play defense — strictly a long stick guy. Now he is all about playing middie or attack — and from what I can tell he has done the work to deserve a shot at it. We’ll see.

Learning to Catch & Throw — Lacrosse at the Beach

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Last week I was on vacation in North Myrtle Beach. We decided to try Myrtle Beach after going to the Outer Banks (Avon, NC) three years straight. I am still trying to process whether I like Myrtle Beach as much as the Outer Banks. The biggest contrast is easily the number of people. I would guess for every one person we saw in a week while in Avon, we saw 50 in Myrtle Beach. For that matter for every restaurant we saw in Avon we saw 20 in Myrtle Beach. North Myrtle Beach and Myrtle Beach are extremely developed. Lots of things to do — in some cases maybe too many — like how many mini golf courses with simulated lava flowing out (colored water) do you really need? Both places are pretty cool for a week long vacation — I could go back to either without a problem, but I will probably lean toward the simpler, less crowded beach experience in Avon, NC.

We brought lax sticks with us and threw the ball around a little bit. My son patiently gave me a few tips about how to throw and catch the ball: “keep your arms away from your body, have your hands about a foot apart, when you throw bring your hands across your body.” “When you prepare to receive keep the head approximately even with your own, move your body toward the ball when it is on its way.” At least I think those are the tips he gave me.

I definitely improved with repetition. I did most of my throwing and catching from my dominant side (right), but I surprised my self by being able to do both on my left side too. Catching on my left was tougher than throwing on my left. I came away thinking I should do some reps against a wall in order to get to equality from both sides.

Learning by doing is what sports are all about — right?

Major League Lacrosse on the Tube

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We were flicking around channels today and spent some time watching Major League Lacrosse (MLL). It was the Chesapeake Bay Hawks team versus a Canadian team — not sure which one. We flicked between that and X Men, I think the second movie. My little guy wanted to stay with X-Men, but my bigger boy had the remote and kept switching back to the game. (I think if Wolverine played lacrosse he would be unstoppable — no stick necessary.)

Even as a lacrosse rookie I could see that MLL is a high level of competition. But should I automatically assume that it is the “highest” level of lacrosse competition? Are these guys heads and shoulders above the top college teams and players? To my untrained eye the difference was not perfectly clear. I mentioned this to my son and he could clearly see that the MLL guys were better.

He pointed out to me the difference in the way that they move the ball around the field — they actually “slow it down” even though there’s a shot clock. Another thing he pointed out was that they rarely sprint the ball down the field on fast breaks. I asked him “why not?” And he replied, ”because they don’t have to.” They know how to make their passes to move the ball up the field. No heroic solo fast breaks necessary. I will have to watch more MLL to see if this holds as a general rule and what other characteristics there are that set MLL at the top of the lax pyramid.

Maybe as my eye becomes more “trained” I will pick up on other characteristics and nuances that show how the MLL game is more advanced than D-1 college and how the individual players are truly the cream of the crop. I don’t have a problem seeing the differences versus the college level when I watch the NFL, MLB or the NBA. In the case of the NBA an exception might be the level of intensity though. Everyone has watched NBA games where the players seem to be sleep walking. But there isn’t much doubt that the physical gifts of the average NBA, NFL or MLB player are vastly superior to the average college D-1 player. That must be true for MLL too. My guess is that as the pool of talent grows, with more D-1 schools fielding lacrosse teams, the talent superiority of MLL will become more distinct.

BlaxLax Club Team

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I am in the process of figuring out how the game of lacrosse works. I grabbed a couple of lacrosse books from the library. I browsed through them, but I haven’t read them thoroughly yet. One of them is Lacrosse for Dummies by Jim Hinkson and Joe Lombardi. It’s kind of weird reading about the rules and details of a sport when every other sport that I know and enjoy I have learned by playing. Football, baseball, basketball, tennis, golf are all sports I essentially learned by playing. Of course if you ever saw my golf game you would have to ask me “Really? You learned something?”

I watched my son’s club team, BlaxLax, play out in Edgewater, MD. It’s about 45 minutes outside of Baltimore. They were playing a team from North Carolina, Fellowship of Christian Athletes. The tournament was called Boy’s OW2P (One Way to Play) National one Way 2 Play Drug Free High School Lacrosse Tournament. The flyer said there were 36 teams involved. By the time I got there it was their 2nd game of the day at 3 p.m.. The first game at 11:00 (which I missed because I took my younger son to his golf lesson at Mt. Pleasant Golf Course in Baltimore) was against the “A” team of this NC group which they lost. The second game was against the “B” team and they won that one 7-6. The NC group had plenty of guys for both squads.

As a lacrosse neophyte and a general observer of sports culture, I look at the White vs. Black ratio and match-up in lacrosse in the same way that I do when I am watching other sports. It is always interesting to me how Whites and Blacks, when left to themselves, approach sports differently in their preparation and execution. Its a cultural thing. The difference here is that I don’t know the game of lacrosse well enough YET to make note of how the cultural differences between Whites and Blacks (suburban / urban) effect how they play lacrosse. One thing did pop out yesterday which is analogous to basketball (which I have played and followed closely for a long time). BlaxLax had a couple of attack guys that put on moves like you might see a quick little point guard put on in a pick up playground game in Baltimore City. If you have ever gone to a high profile summer league basketball game with some real “players” you have seen guys show off some crazy cross-overs, fakes, spins, hesitation, etc. Well BlaxLax did a little bit of that yesterday. It was like “oohs and aahs” time. As a watched I thought, this is where I expect African American lacrosse to go eventually. Basketball-like playground moves and acrobatic finishes. BlaxLax was not too strong on their finishes yesterday, and that is clearly the next frontier for this team. I remember playing in basketball games when we were able to penetrate off a dribble move and get to the rim over and over again but were short on the finishes for some reason. It’s a concentration issue that can be hard to shake off within a quarter, a half, or even a whole game. Sometimes its contagious.

I have seen these guys progress from not being being able to catch and throw consistently to figuring out how to work it around, control the ball under pressure, and put it into the hands of the “ball-handler / penetrator” and then for the other guys to be aware enough to get open for the dish or the “tip-in.” There are probably lacrosse terms for “dish” and “tip-in” but I don’t know what they are. Yet.