Is Lacrosse the future sport of the Midwest?  The sport is slowly making its way from the East Coast to the Great Plains as many people never expected.  Lacrosse is very popular on the east coast, and is even more popular than football.  Nebraska has always been known as a football state, but the people here have always had an open heart for other sports.  Football athletes are often befuddled if they don’t have a spring sport, and lacrosse could easily fit their skill set.  There are much less brain injuries in the sport compared to football and it’s equally as physical.  It also can get the athletes in great shape for their primary sports, they can run between 3-5 miles in a game.  That’s about the same as a soccer player, as the two sports are actually very similar.  They are both very free flowing and the game is always moving.  

Offensively, the objective of the game is to score by shooting the ball into an opponent’s goal past the goalie, using the lacrosse stick to catch, cradle, and pass the ball.   Defensively, the objective is to keep the other team from scoring and to steal the ball through the use of stick checking and body contact or positioning.  The sport consists of four positions: midfield, attack, defense and goalie.  Attackers can only attack, defenders can only defend, but midfielders can attack and defend.   It’s not like football where the game sometimes even takes 30 seconds between plays.  Lacrosse is a 60 minute game divided by 4 quarters so that’s one of the few similarities between football and lacrosse.  10 people are on a field at once and there’s around 20 on a team.

Logan Kelley is one of the few spartans to play lacrosse. He plays for a club team called Lincoln Rampage.  The spring sport for his first 3 years of high school was baseball, but he decided to quit because he was burned out by it.  He felt like he could use his skills in a different way and shine in a different sport.  A couple weeks after he quit baseball, he went to a family friend’s lacrosse game and he immediately fell in love with it.  As soon as he got home, he bought a lacrosse stick and watched lots of youtube videos on the sport.  Logan has been playing for less than a year and he already has a couple of colleges that are interested in him.    In January, he went to a showcase in Chicago, and said that he met a lot of kids there that play for their high school.

The funding for the sport could be one of the main arguments against it being approved by the NSAA.  It will stay in the bigger towns and probably not the small towns, so mostly class A.   A little town like Valentine or Cozad would struggle to get the funding, as well as the amount of people to be on a team.  A benefit of this sport is that it keeps kids that don’t play a spring sport stay active in the spring.  Lacrosse could be a NSAA approved sport in the next 10-20 years.