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The Sport Moving into the Spotlight

© Sue Poremba

When I was in high school, our gym teacher insisted that we play this game called lacrosse. We farm kids had no clue what lacrosse was; we'd never heard of it, let alone seen it played. (Soccer, back then, was only slightly more familiar.) However, our gym teacher had played on the national lacrosse team and, when I had her for a teacher, she was a collegiate and national referee. Because it was her sport, we learned how to play.

I remember joking that it was nothing more than field hockey, upside down. That is, of course, extraordinarily simplistic. True, the field hockey players in my class took to the game quickly, but the game as I recall took a lot of balance and coordination. Because I have good balance and an aggressive attitude toward sports, I did surprisingly well.

Without going into details (which the websites will explain much more indepth), the basic premise is to take the small white rubber ball and put it in the goal, all the while it is being caught, carried, and passed in the tiny net of the lacrosse stick. The defense tries to check the ball away from the offensive.

It is played by both girls and boys, and in the U.S., it is most popular in the east. It is not a sport for the meek, but definitly a sport to take in if you enjoy action. The reason I decided to write about lacrosse isn't because of my own great love of the sport. In all honesty, I shy away from it due to an injury I suffered in my final high school gym class. Instead, I found myself surprised by the growing interest in the sport. In my day job, one of my responsibilities is to enter applications for sports camps. Each day, there is a good stack for the four different lacrosse camps offered here. These are high school kids, many of them with 4, 5, or more years of experience. The popularity of the lacrosse camps rivals the popularity of basketball, softball, and soccer camps. Granted, these campers are coming to an eastern university with a strong women's lacrosse program and a strengthening men's program. Yet, co-workers have said that lacrosse is the sports' camps bright new star. Based on the slow but growing popularity of professional lacrosse, I'd guess that lacrosse is the bright "new" star in the sports world.

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