News-Letter

Though lacrosse has just recently grown exponentially in popularity at the collegiate and high school levels, the game may actually date back as far as the early 15th century, making it America's oldest pastime.

The highly athletic game, a mixture of football, hockey and basketball, is played on a grass field. Two teams, 10 players apiece, roam the field on foot, arranging themselves into offensive and defensive patterns. The game can be rough, and the players wear protective gear. Men wear more padding than women.

In the 17th century, French settlers in North America called the game "la crosse," which means "the stick." The Onondaga people called it dehuntshigwa'es ("men hit a rounded object"); the Cherokee people called it da-nah-wah'uwsdi ("little war"); and in Ojibwe it was known as baggattawag ("they bump balls").

The game's transition from an American Indian sport into its current incarnation is reported to have begun with Jesuit missionary St. Jean de Br8ebeuf, who documented a lacrosse contest among the Huron people in 1636. French pioneers began pursuing the sport in the 1800s, and by 1867 George Beers institutionalized the game by establishing number limits for each team and standard field sizes, among other basic rules.

Today, lacrosse may inspire a religious fervor in but a few zealous college fans. To the American Indians however, the sport has always and continues to serve a spiritual purpose. "Conjurers" ritually prepare equipment and players for a match, and it is often believed that the victor is supernaturally determined.

Lacrosse was also sometimes used to arguments between tribes. These solutions were often peaceful, but they sometimes spiralled out of control. In 1790, the Choctaw and the Creek used a lacrosse game to settle a border dispute, but a controversial refereeing call sparked a deadly battle.

Lacrosse has a long association with violence. According to legend, American Indians would play lacrosse as a kind of training for war. Myth tells of an epic-sized lacrosse contest, featuring more than 1,000 players from various tribes. According to various stories, the field sometimes grew to 15 miles in length and lasted for 15 days. Lacrosse balls were made from deerskin and baked clay.

Because of a lack of documents and evidence, most accounts of the history of lacrosse before the arrival of the French and English are based on tales and legends. Aside from some knowledge of the equipment used by the American Indians, the early history of lacrosse remains inaccessible to historians.

Despite its age, lacrosse seems like a sport new to the American scene. This can be attributed to the near extinction of the game around the late 19th century. American government officials and Christian missionaries had been long resentful of lacrosse; they believed that the sport got in the way of church attendance and that gameplay had an impoverishing effect on the American Indians. In 1900, when the Choctaw people of Oklahoma began to fashion weapons out of their lacrosse sticks by attaching lead weights, the game was banned.

Newly revived, lacrosse is mushrooming in popularity. According to U.S. Lacrosse, "No sport has grown faster at the high school level over the last 10 years and there are now more than 130,000 high school players. [It] is also the fastest-growing sport over the last five years at the NCAA level."

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