If you watched yesterday’s ACC or Big Ten women’s lacrosse championships games (or our whiparound coverage on TikTok Live), you might have noticed something that we’ve seen as a bit of a problem over the last couple of years. And that is the number of times in both games when aggressive play and use of the stick led to incidents when players were coming up around the head and neck areas.
Combined, in these two title games which represent a substantial portion of lacrosse royalty, there were 23 cards given out.
And these weren’t about the midfield fouls which draw greens. There were dangerous uses of the stick all over these two games, including one instance when a goal was seemingly scored by Maryland’s Jordyn Lipkin, but it was ruled out for dangerous propelling. Simultaneously, Northwestern’s Mary Carroll also received a yellow card for a foul.
Much has been made of how the sport of women’s lacrosse has changed over the last 25 years, especially in a term which I use: “physicality.” When I reference this, I think about how physical prowess — size, strength, speed — has ramped up in all phases of women’s lacrosse over the years.
Much of the physicality has been reflected in the willingness of forwards to fire the ball at cage with great pace. Because of the current stick technology, especially titanium shafts and offset heads, players are shooting with greater accuracy and greater velocity than ever before.
Defenders, in trying to counter these forwards, are using the shafts of the sticks to body up on their opposing marks, and, occasionally, wind up sliding the stick upwards to the head and neck, or having the stick pressing against the body, like the incident a few years ago in which a Yale player’s internal organs were damaged during a game against Stony Brook.
I guess it’s good that yesterday, we didn’t see off-the-ball collisions like we saw in games earlier this year involving teams like Northwestern, Flagler, and Boston College.
But it’s going to get to a point where there will be a serious head injury unless there is a change of some kind. Could the NCAA go to WLL rules, where there are 10 players a side rather than 12? Could the game be given a bigger arc and fan to create more room in the attack end? Or perhaps slow the exit velocity of a lacrosse shot by either changing the composition of the ball or banning the offset stick?
There are a lot of options at play, short of putting helmets and pads on the players.
And I really hope this doesn’t happen.