As fourth-graders do, Satrick Green tagged along with his older cousin to a recreation-league practice one day. What he saw was too weird for a youngster’s brain to digest: Face-masked kids wielding sticks with nets attached, whipping solid rubber balls at super-sized ice hockey goals.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” Green said of his first encounter with lacrosse.
Now Green, freshly graduated from Decatur High School, sleeps in a bedroom cluttered with lacrosse sticks and bedecked with T-shirts from lacrosse camps he has attended. In August, some of those sticks and tees will be packed for the move to Limestone College in Gaffney, S.C., which awarded him a scholarship to scoop, slide and clamp for a team that went 15-2 this season.
Barely a year ago, “I had thought it was another sport you just do in high school,” he said.
That there is a lacrosse life beyond senior proms and class rings has been a welcome discovery to Green and other Georgians, most of them concentrated in metro Atlanta. The sport, once the province of affluent families in the northeast and especially the Baltimore area, is gaining a foothold in the football-crazed south.
Athletes engaged in other sports increasingly taste-test lacrosse and become intoxicated by it, then often switch from their first love. The website laxpower.com, which monitors recruiting, lists 64 new Georgia graduates gearing up to play college, some as walk-ons and others at non-scholarship schools. Only 14 other states churned out more. The state’s girls output (59) also was 15th highest.
One demographic benefiting from the explosion is black high-schoolers who were reared without the slighest concept of the sport.
Green took it up sooner than most. His mother, Stacy Green, is program supervisor at the Decatur Recreation Center. Perturbed that her full work plate had just gotten fuller with the breaking in of a new league, she nonetheless provided Green with a stick so he could burn off energy outside the football and basketball seasons.
Acquaintances were perplexed. “You’re playing a white sport?” Green was asked so often that he stopped disclosing his involvement. “Some friends, they thought it was the dumbest thing,” he said.
In time, Green wore his lacrosse badge proudly, carrying a stick around campus. As part of a school project, he preached the lacrosse gospel to youngsters at clinics in urban rec centers.
Not until he enrolled at a summer camp in North Carolina last year did Green discover that lacrosse offered a potential payback. His quicksilver moves caught the attention of college coaches, and the teen who envisioned himself in a more mainstream sport until he stopped growing at 5 feet 5, earned a one-third tuition break, the standard amount for lacrosse grants-in-aid.
Green is a lacrosse old-timer alongside peers Jamany Lewis and Darian Richardson.
Lewis was a ninth-grader in Las Vegas when lacrosse equipment was brought out for a physical-education class. He dove right in, even though “I didn’t think it was a real sport.”
A year later, Lewis and lacrosse arrived in tandem at Grady High. Lewis, partial to football, was not certified in time to join the team, so he gave lacrosse a whirl.
“I thought it would be hard, but learning lacrosse is easier than other sports,” Lewis said.
On the Knights’ inaugural 20-man roster, only three had accumulated experience, each in the Decatur rec league, said Grady coach Jon Ochsner. All but five were black.
Lewis learned quickly enough to land with fellow Grady grad (and roommate) Jalen Rideaux at Oglethorpe in non-scholarship NCAA Division III. Both just completed their freshman seasons.
“The beauty of this is, [Lewis] would never have gone to college,” Ochsner said. “The fact that he got to college due to his playing lacrosse is a testament to what we are doing in the city.”
At Wheeler High in Marietta, renowned for its basketball, “lacrosse is rapidly becoming the new thing to do for kids of all races,” said community coach Chris Kelly.
Accomplished high school wrestler Darian Richardson was a ninth-grader when he noticed lacrosse sticks at school and thought, “This looks cool. I think I’ll try out.”
Wrestlers being inherently driven, Richardson acclimated quickly even as pals chided him by saying, “Black people don’t play lacrosse.”
Some of the teasers are now teammates. The Wildcats’ rainbow roster is, by Kelly’s count, a potpourri that includes African-American, white, Filipino, Japanese, Peruvian and Persian.
Georgia will field 74 girls and 72 boys teams next spring, up one from this year for each gender — and about triple the amount a decade ago. Local advocates say local interest dates to 1992 with a grass-roots program at a northeast Atlanta park.
To help defray the cost of camps and gear — the Greens just paid nearly $200 for a stick — Open Door Lacrosse of Georgia has provided “scholarships” to nearly 100 youngsters. The foundation promotes ethnic, economic and gender diversity within the sport.
Expansion on the college level in the south remains at a relative crawl. The ACC is limited to four men’s and six women’s teams, while the SEC remains a lacrosse-free zone aside from Vanderbilt women.
The lone upper-level option in the state is Mercer, which launched last year. Coach Jason Childs already lists 22 Georgians on the 48-player roster and would welcome more homegrown players such as Sam Grayson of McIntosh, a convert from high school soccer who started every Mercer game this season.
Childs strives to blend the more seasoned northern transplants, some initiated as pre-schoolers, with fleet, strong southerners whose skills might barely be tapped.
“Without a shadow of a doubt, there are better athletes the further south you go,” Childs said.
“If you take someone like Michael Vick with his athletic ability and put a lacrosse stick in his hand, it’s scary what he’s able to do.”
Borrowing a metric from the state’s most popular game, Childs said, “It’s really hard to catch a kid [advancing the ball in lacrosse] who runs a 4.5.”
Childs was dazzled enough by Green that he pitched a walk-on spot. [NCAA members can divvy up the equivalent of 12.6 scholarships per year for rosters of 45 or more.]
But even Georgians, residing outside the sport’s primary borders, have choices. Green fell for a small school where the burden of a nearly $20,000 annual tuition will be eased because he can hurl a little white ball into some netting.
“He was always going to college,” his mom said. “We’re just using lacrosse to get in the door.”
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