Lacrosse Terrapin Style

After last year's painful 17-16 loss to Virginia in the NCAA National Lacrosse Championship game, the Maryland Terrapins are roaring back with big margins of victory in their first two games of 2022. They're doing it with the return of five U.S. Intercollegiate Association All-Americans, five top ranked transfers (including one each from Virginia and Johns Hopkins), and five nationally ranked freshmen. The team needs every man to meet the challenge brought on by strong Big Ten and powerhouse teams. For certain the Terps will be well-prepared for the national tournament in May.

Much of the credit for Maryland's recent success goes to its head coach, John Tillman, an extraordinary recruiter with nine years of coaching experience at Ithaca, Navy, and Harvard. In his eleven years at Maryland he brought the team to eight NCAA Final Four appearances and six title games, including the 2017 National Championship. It's been nothing less than a brilliant blend of team management and player skill. 

So what is this game called lacrosse? Lacrosse is an ancient American sport, dating from about 1000 C.E. In it's early days, the game had a religious significance. Sides could consist of as many as a few thousand players and the losing side sometimes paid with their lives. In the middle of the 19th century William George Beers, a Canadian dentist and lacrosse enthusiast, wrote rules and parameters to make the game more gentlemanly. His efforts paid dividends quickly as many clubs formed from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River Valley. The Mohawk Lacrosse Club (New York, 1868) was the first club in the United States. Intercollegiate competition followed a decade later focused on universities from New York to Maryland.  

 

An Indian Ball-Play                            George Catlin, 1846-50

Fast forward to today and you could say the game still has that religious fervor if you live from Maryland to New England, that part of the country where three-year-old boys (and some girls) get little lacrosse sticks for Christmas. These days, the teams are a bit smaller - ten players to a side - and there's almost always some bloodshed of the non-fatal variety. Just a generation ago the game at the college level was a virtually exclusive sport heavily anchored in the Ivy League and the Northeast. Today there are more than sixty Division I teams found on the East and West Coasts and at the flagship universities in the interior. Each year that number grows by two or three teams. Expansion in other college divisions and at the K-12 level is so great that the sport is recognized as the fastest growing team sport in the country. If you're interested in more information go to usalacrosse.com

Today around 900,000 players participate in some form of organized lacrosse. I'd say that's a sign of an outstanding future for the game. More specifically I hope there's also an outstanding future for Terp lacrosse through May of this year and beyond.

Go Big Red!

Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
Catlin painting, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington;
1955 photo, University of Maryland, The Terrapin, p. 228

Text:

Wikipedia.org

usalacrosse.com