Northwestern lacrosse players stride onto the field. Photo by Rachel Schneider / North by Northwestern

When senior attacker Meredith Frank sunk a pass from senior midfielder Hannah Nielsen into the back of the Duke goal at Lakeside Field on April 3, the packed stands erupted into raucous cheers. Over 1,300 fans had turned out to see that play, the one that allowed Nielsen to take the NCAA all-time record for assists and the Northwestern women’s lacrosse team to tally its 49th consecutive victory at home.

Not ten miles away, the scene was completely different. As the seconds ticked away on the scoreboards hanging above the four fields of the Chicago Indoor Sports Complex last fall, soccer players attempted their final shots and goalies attempted their final saves. After the buzzers sounded, they trudged off the fields, passing several lacrosse players from the Lakeshore Lacrosse League and eyeing them with puzzlement. Many of them had never even seen a lacrosse stick before.

According to the 2007 US Lacrosse Participation Survey, crowded stands like those at the Lakeside Field will become ever more commonplace in the coming years, as lacrosse is now the fastest growing sport in the United States. Since 2001, the first year the survey was published, the number of active lacrosse players has nearly doubled, bringing the total number of players to around 480,000. Most new players have come from the youth and high school levels.

“The main reason why people are drawn to play it is because they’re curious,” said Weinberg sophomore Colleen Horne, who plays for Northwestern’s club team and coaches the JV team at Evanston Township High School. “That’s why I picked up a stick, because I didn’t know what it was. It was just a new, exciting thing that no one else really knew about.”

The irony is that, of the sports played in the U.S. today, lacrosse’s history may be the longest. Originally a Native American sport, lacrosse was first documented by French missionaries in 1636 and codified by Canadian George William Beers in 1867. Its position in mainstream American athletics was solidified in 1998 with the foundation of US Lacrosse, the national governing body of men’s and women’s lacrosse.

A Northwestern player goes for the goal. Photo by Rachel Schneider / North by Northwestern

Colleen Sperry Aungst, public relations manager for US Lacrosse, attributes the quickly accelerating spread of the sport across the US to her organization’s many programs, which are “reaching more and more people every day across the country.”

“It’s really a collaborative effort between our organization, volunteers and other strands of the sport that are spreading the word and creating opportunities in growing areas,” she added.

As the sport begins to move beyond its conventional socioeconomic and geographic barriers, it has been struggling to overcome the remnants of a long-standing elitist reputation.

“Lacrosse has traditionally been viewed as a white, suburban, prep-school sport,” said Ken Foulk, executive director of the Bobby Campbell Lacrosse Foundation, a Trenton, N.J. program affiliated with US Lacrosse. “One of the reasons why that is, is because of the cost to play the game. There’s a lot of equipment involved, especially for the boys — the sticks, the gloves, the pads, the helmets — that prohibit lacrosse from being played in an inner-city environment or in poorer areas.”

High quality sticks, for example, usually cost around $70 to $100. The Northwestern women’s lacrosse team’s stick of choice – designed by and named after Northwestern head coach Kelly Amonte Hiller – costs around $120, according to junior defender Sara Harrington. Though beginner sticks can be as sixth as expensive, that cost alone could be enough for athletes from less affluent families to turn to cheaper sports like soccer or basketball.

Medill junior Asma Ahmad*, who played on Northwestern’s club team last year and plans on playing again next year, said the cost of the game has definitely bothered her. “To pay for it all, I used money that I had saved up,” said Ahmad, who estimates she spent $300 to $400 on uniforms and equipment during her four years on the team at Northside College Preparatory High School in Chicago. “I never really wanted to ask my parents for [the money] because it was such an expensive sport. … I ended up getting a job just so I didn’t have to worry about paying for anything.”

Foulk said his Trenton program aims to address this barrier to entry by providing free equipment, transportation and instruction to its 100 youth players, but he doesn’t think programs like his are contributing significantly to lacrosse’s rise in popularity.

Instead, the trend is mostly a result of “natural progression,” he said.

“Lacrosse is a very exciting game,” Foulk said. “It’s fun to play, and it’s fun to watch. … It’s not like baseball, where you stand out in the outfield watching the grass grow. In lacrosse, everybody touches the ball. If you’re on the field, you’re involved.”

Even with the sport’s recent rapid growth, however, a vast majority of players are still concentrated in the northeast. When the US Lacrosse Participation Survey was published in 2007, New York and Maryland topped the list of states with the most youth players, with 50,856 and 38,645 players respectively. Third-ranked Massachusetts had 18,242.

The unique competitive atmosphere created by the sheer density of the sport has given that region a reputation for breeding top-notch lacrosse players. Of the 31 players on Northwestern’s team, 16 are from New York and Massachusetts. There are four players from Westwood, Mass. alone, including Harrington, Frank and Frank’s younger sister Alexandra.

Harrington said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go so far from home to play lacrosse in college — but thanks to the number of Northwestern players from her area, she thought she would “have some roots out here.”

It may be a while until those roots fully take hold, however. Illinois, for example, didn’t even have the 3,500 youth players that would have placed it in the aforementioned list’s top 15. Northwestern’s dominance of women’s lacrosse is still an anomaly – less reflective of the sport’s popularity in the Midwest than of the coaching prowess of Amonte Hiller, a Massachusetts native who played for the University of Maryland.

A 2008 issue of Sports Illustrated likened the success of Northwestern’s lacrosse program to “Miami fielding a top skiing program.”

Ahmad said that Chicagoland high schools certainly benefit having a four-time NCAA championship team so close to home, as many schools visit the team’s home games to learn techniques and strategies. But she doubts the Wildcats will be the deciding influence on the sport’s popularity in the Midwest.

“The amount of local coverage the team gets on news shows every spring has significantly increased, and that’s making a lot more people stop and notice the sport,” she said. But, she adds, “If there’s anything that’s going to make lacrosse popular in Chicago, it’s the cost. … Even if more high schools start having varsity teams, for the most part, they won’t be as accessible as other sports because of financial reasons.”

Asma Ahmad is a NBN contributor. She writes for our Idiot Vox television blog.