In the fall of 1998, the first game this site witnessed after our go-live was a field hockey game between Baltimore Park School (Md.) and Baltimore Bryn Mawr (Md.). So, in a sense, yesterday’s trip back to Rosabelle Sinclair Field for the 100th anniversary of girls’ scholastic lacrosse was a full-circle moment for this space.
I came with my journalistic antennae on, as well as a healthy sense of historical curiosity. As much as we can laud Bryn Mawr as the first girls’ scholastic lacrosse team, there was one question for which I did not have the answer; who was Bryn Mawr’s first opponent?
After all, when you think about the nature of sport, it only begins when the second team is organized to play the first.
If you’ve read up on your scholastic field hockey history (either here or elsewhere), you’d know that the first scholastic field hockey game in 1909 was between Haddonfield (N.J.) Memorial and Moorestown (N.J.). Bess Taylor, having organized the Haddonfield side through persuading school officials, as well as having mentorship and backing from the great Constance Applebee, already had one opponent lined up. More schools would follow in the next decade.
In contrast, we don’t know a lot about the early years of girls’ scholastic lacrosse. That’s because a lot of the primary source materials were school yearbooks rather than newspaper articles. Remember that a school yearbook is a single snapshot in time, usually cribbed together during the school year and shipped off to the printer so that the finished product arrives in time for either graduation or whenever a school traditionally hands out its yearbooks.
So, I spent time yesterday looking at the museum-quality display which was steps away from Sinclair Field. The yearbook pages showed that, for several seasons in the early years of Bryn Mawr lacrosse, the only game played in some years was against Baltimore Roland Park (Md.), located about a mile southwest of campus.
It would be logical to think that the opponent for Bryn Mawr would have been Roland Park, which is Bryn Mawr’s historical rival. But in talking with some folks who assembled the display, the first opponent for Bryn Mawr was, apparently, Baltimore Friends School (Md.), an institution which is about a mile due south of the Bryn Mawr School.
If you know a little about the cluster of private schools at the northern border of the city of Baltimore, you’d understand how a sport like lacrosse could foster and grow. Within a brisk walk of Bryn Mawr School are a number of schools for which lacrosse is more than just a tradition, but something akin to a birthright.
The rivalries and teams over the years have grown to a point where the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland is perennially the toughest league in the country and one of the most progressive, being the first in the nation to adopt modified collegiate rules including the 90-second possession clock.
But remember: it wouldn’t have happened without the second girls’ lacrosse team.