This morning, along Northern Parkway in Baltimore, there will be a gathering to celebrate a milestone of lacrosse.
There is going to be a doubleheader of girls’ lacrosse games, between Baltimore Roland Park (Md.) and Glenelg (Md.), and between Baltimore Bryn Mawr (Md.) and Philadelphia Penn Charter (Pa.).
The celebration is for the 100th anniversary of girls’ high-school lacrosse, which had rules codified by Rosabelle Sinclair, who eventually became the first female inductee in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Sinclair brought the game from Scotland, where it was taught at St. Leonard’s School. As the story goes, Louisa Lumsden had witnessed an 1884 game between the Montreal Lacrosse Club and a First Nations team from the Canghuwaya Nation. She wrote down as much as she could remember and understand about what she witnessed, and codified some rules. By 1908, the first game in Scotland with women’s rules was contested, and by 1926, Sinclair brought the game to The Bryn Mawr School.
For much of the next 80 years, everything Lumsden witnessed was reflected in the way that women played the game. There were no hard boundaries: on shots and passes rolling into nearby brush, the first player to the edge of the effective playing area would earn the ball. The goal crease was a square instead of a circle.
Five years after Sinclair brought the game to Bryn Mawr, the United States Women’s Lacrosse Association was formed as the governing and rulesmaking body for women’s lacrosse.
And believe me, there have been a lot of rules changes in 100 years. There has been “freeze tag,” and “free movement.” There was the change of the scoring area from a square to a goal circle, arc, and fan. There were free position opportunities which, depending on the era, were either direct free shots, opportunities for clever passing plays, or a combination of the two.
The playing surface also changed. There is a hard boundary now, but some host sites built their home grounds with advantage in mind. Some teams played on an oddly-shaped fields or ones which were much larger than others to allow a team to take advantage of its speed. Others had obstacles like sheds, pole-vault pits, football goalposts, trees, and park benches, all in play.
Sticks went from mulberry to plastic molded heads, although it took a while for universal adoption of the latter. It got to the point where holdouts who used wood sticks for training and the tightening of skills had to go to the plastic heads because few people outside Native American reservations made wooden lacrosse sticks.
Tactics also changed. Because of the Scottish/English influence of the sport, the positions for the players were given many of the same names as cricket fielders. Each of the individual 12 players were given specific individual duties; no two players had quite the same role. A first-home was a passer, a second-home was a scorer, for example.
The game you see today is a different contest. The sticks are made with space-age materials. Some specialists participate in one aspect of the game: the draw. After the draw, the player with a special drawstick runs off the field for a midfield substitute.
With sticks that can throw more accurate passes than those of 30 years ago, the game is much quicker, and the margins for error are much finer than they used to be.
I encourage you, on this day of remembrance, to go see a game in your area.