97 Fun Facts About Lacrosse

The Choctaw and Chickasaw call stickball, lacrosse's cousin, the 'little brother of' what?

War: when a dispute arose over land or politics, the elders would name a field and settle it with a game of stickball rather than a battle.

Which French Jesuit missionary, writing about Huron ball games in the 1630s, is credited with naming lacrosse?

Jean de Brébeuf is often said to have seen a bishop's crosier, la crosse in French, in the players' curved sticks, yet his own journals never make the comparison.

The Mississippi River city of La Crosse, named after the Indigenous game, is in which US state?

Wisconsin: explorer Zebulon Pike wrote the name Prairie La Crosse on his 1805 trip up the river, after the ball game Native Americans played on the open ground there.

Indigenous nations described lacrosse as being played 'for' whom?

The Creator: many Indigenous nations call lacrosse the Creator's Game, played to honour and entertain the Creator and as medicine for healing.

In traditional Indigenous lacrosse, which could involve hundreds of players, the ball could not be touched with what?

Their hands: the ball was carried and thrown only with the stick, on open ground with no boundaries and goals up to several miles apart, so one game could run for days.

Traditional wooden lacrosse sticks are steam-bent from which wood?

Hickory: boys of the Iroquois nations are traditionally given a small wooden stick at birth and buried with one, and players are taught to honour the tree that died to make it.

Which Canadian dentist, known as the father of modern lacrosse, published the game's first written rules in 1860?

William George Beers was a teenage goalkeeper when he set down the field size and team numbers in an 1860 pamphlet, and the national association formed in 1867 adopted his rules.

Which university's lacrosse team represented America at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics?

Johns Hopkins: no national squad was picked, so the college team played a Canadian all-star side three times in the Memorial Coliseum and won the series two games to one.

In which city did players from Kahnawake stage an 1834 demonstration that introduced settlers to lacrosse?

Montreal: newspapers reported the Kahnawake players' game, English-speaking locals soon took up the sport themselves, and by 1856 they had formed a club of their own.

Which British monarch watched touring Canadian lacrosse teams and called the game 'very pretty to watch'?

Queen Victoria saw it in 1876, when a Canadian team and a Kahnawake team toured Britain to win the game new followers overseas.

A men's field lacrosse team fields a goalie, three attackmen, three defensemen and three what?

Midfielders: an offside rule keeps four of a team's ten players in its own half and three in the other, so only the three 'middies' cover the whole field.

In box lacrosse, what are the five players who join the goalie on the floor called?

Runners: forwards, defenders and transition players all share the name, and they rotate on and off the floor in shifts while play goes on.

What is the circle around a lacrosse goal, which attackers may not enter, called?

The crease: a goal is wiped out if the shooter is standing on or inside its line, and inside it the goalie is shielded from opponents' stick checks.

Lacrosse is often billed as 'the fastest sport on' what?

Two feet: the tag is claimed for both the outdoor field game and the indoor box game, where rebounds off the boards keep the ball in play.

What is a lacrosse ball made of?

Solid rubber: earlier balls were carved from wood or sewn from deerskin stuffed with hair, until the first written rules of the 1860s swapped in hard rubber.

What must box lacrosse teams do within 30 seconds of possession?

Shoot on goal: a 30-second clock starts with each possession, as in basketball, and a team that fails to get a shot away hands the ball to its opponents.

Which version of lacrosse uses moulded plastic sticks and a soft hollow ball, with no contact?

Intercrosse was designed as a low-risk game for schools and recreation programmes, a first taste of lacrosse without the hard ball or the hits.

Box lacrosse was devised to fill which venues off-season?

Hockey arenas: the rinks sat empty for months each year, so their owners promoted a game on the bare floor, and it is now more popular in Canada than the field game.

The modern women's game was introduced in 1890 at St Leonards School in which country?

Scotland: the school is in St Andrews, and its first headmistress, Louisa Lumsden, had watched a match in Canada in 1884 and found the game 'beautiful and graceful'.

What protective equipment are US women's field players required to wear?

Eyewear and a mouthguard: the women's rules ban body contact, so field players go without the helmets and pads of the men's game, and only goalkeepers wear them.

Lacrosse was an Olympic medal sport in 1904 and 1908, then returned three times as what?

A demonstration event: no medals were awarded in 1928, 1932 or 1948, and the sport then stayed away until it was voted back in for Los Angeles 2028.

Which two nations contested the 1908 Olympic lacrosse tournament in London?

Canada and Great Britain: three teams had entered, but South Africa withdrew, which left a single game for the title, and Canada won it.

In which format was lacrosse added to the programme of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics?

Sixes: World Lacrosse built the six-a-side format, with a smaller field and shorter games, to cut the cost of playing and staging the sport and win it a place at the Games.

On what basis does World Lacrosse admit the Iroquois Confederacy's team to its world championships?

As a sovereign nation: the federation accepted the Confederacy as a full member in the late 1980s, and its players travel to tournaments on passports their own nations issue.

The Iroquois team dropped 'Iroquois' from its name in 2022 in favour of what?

Haudenosaunee Nationals: Haudenosaunee, 'people of the longhouse', is the confederacy's own name for itself, while Iroquois is a name that outsiders gave it.

In 2010, the Iroquois Nationals missed the world championship in which country over passport disputes?

England: British officials would not accept the confederacy's own passports, and the players refused to travel on American or Canadian ones, so they missed the tournament in Manchester.

Which country won the first Women's Lacrosse World Cup, held in 1982?

The United States beat Australia in the final in Nottingham, but four years later the Australians took the trophy from them on American soil.

World Lacrosse was formed in 2008 by merging separate international federations for which two groups?

Men and women: the women's federation dated from 1972 and the men's from 1974, and the merged body renamed itself World Lacrosse in 2019, months after the IOC first recognised it.

The NCAA's first men's lacrosse championship in 1971 was won by which school?

Cornell: until 1971 the champion was named on regular-season records alone, and the Big Red won the first title to be settled by a tournament.

Which NFL legend is also in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame and has the PLL's MVP award named after him?

Jim Brown scored 43 goals in ten games as a college senior on an unbeaten 1957 team, and the lacrosse hall of fame took him in twelve years before college football's did.

Four-time All-American Gary Gait played and in 2021 became head coach at which university?

Syracuse: Gait won three straight NCAA titles there, though the third was later struck from the records after the coach's wife co-signed a car loan for his twin brother.

Which player and his brother founded the Premier Lacrosse League in 2018?

Paul and Mike Rabil set it up as a rival to Major League Lacrosse, and after two seasons the older league merged into theirs, bringing the Boston Cannons with it as an eighth team.

How was the PLL's inaugural 2019 season structured?

A 14-week tour of 12 cities: the six teams had no home markets and all travelled to a new city each weekend, and only in 2024 were they given home cities.

Which team won the Premier Lacrosse League's first championship in 2019?

Whipsnakes: league MVP Matt Rambo tied the final with 21 seconds left, then scored the winner in overtime to beat the Redwoods 12-11.

Which NHL star is the nephew and namesake of a Buffalo Bandits great who played 24 seasons of box lacrosse?

John Tavares: the younger one was a ball boy for his uncle's Bandits, and says the checks and scrambles of box lacrosse shaped the way he plays on the ice.

Rosabelle Sinclair's 1926 girls' team, credited with establishing women's lacrosse in America, was at a school in which city?

Baltimore: Sinclair had learned the game as a schoolgirl in Britain and started the team at the Bryn Mawr School, and she became the first woman in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.

Under a 1994 act, lacrosse is Canada's official national sport of which season?

Summer: for over a century many Canadians believed an 1867 law had made lacrosse the national game, but none existed until this act, which gave ice hockey the winter.

Which US service academy went unbeaten in lacrosse from 1917 through 1923?

Navy: the First World War cut its 1917 season short, yet that year began seven straight unbeaten seasons, a run that did not end until 1924.

In 1763, Native players staged a lacrosse game as a ruse to get inside what?

A British fort: at Michilimackinac, in what is now Michigan, the soldiers were invited to watch, and the players are said to have worked the game toward the gates before rushing in.

What is the lacrosse skill of keeping the ball in the stick's pocket while running called?

Cradling is so much a part of carrying the ball that teams fake it: in a hidden ball play, one player rocks an empty stick to fool the defence while a teammate has the ball.

What starts each quarter of a men's field lacrosse game and follows every goal?

A face-off: two players crouch over the ball and fight to clamp it under their sticks at the whistle, a skill so specialised that some players come on only to do that.

Which Algonquian name did early European observers record for the Indigenous game that became lacrosse?

Baggataway comes from an Ojibwe verb for playing the game; each nation had its own word for it, and the Onondaga one means 'they bump hips', for reasons any spectator can see.

Which school won seven consecutive NCAA women's lacrosse titles starting in 1995?

Maryland: the run lasted until 2001 under coach Cindy Timchal, and one of its first stars, Kelly Amonte Hiller, went on to coach Northwestern to five straight titles of her own.

Canada's senior men's box lacrosse championship trophy is called what?

Mann Cup: railway builder Sir Donald Mann gave the gold trophy in 1910 for the outdoor field game, and it only became an indoor prize in 1932; the older Minto Cup now goes to the juniors.

A club called the Shamrocks won the first Olympic lacrosse gold in 1904; which Canadian city was it from?

Winnipeg: only three of the four teams entered ever took the field, a Brooklyn club never appearing, and the Shamrocks beat the hosts' St. Louis side for the gold.

Which US state made headgear compulsory for all its girls' high school lacrosse players in the 2010s?

Florida: the national rules leave headgear optional, because the girls' game bans the body contact that makes helmets standard for boys.

The NLL, the pro box circuit, began play in 1987 under a name featuring which bird?

The Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League had four teams playing a six-game season; the NLL name arrived in 1998.

In the 2004 comedy Mean Girls, which character ends up joining the lacrosse team to channel her anger?

Regina George ends the film on the lacrosse field, where her aggression finally has a useful outlet, while Gretchen finds a new clique and Karen becomes the school's weather girl.

MTV's Teen Wolf made Scott McCall a lacrosse player; which sport did Scott play in the original 1985 film?

Basketball was the game in the 1985 film, and the series changed the origin too: its Scott becomes a werewolf through a bite rather than inheriting the trait from his father.

In which 1999 teen comedy does Chris 'Oz' Ostreicher skip his lacrosse championship game to sing a duet?

American Pie makes Oz the school's lacrosse star, and his choice to walk out of the title game for a choir duet with Heather shows that his feelings for her have become sincere.

Which longtime NFL head coach captained the lacrosse team at Wesleyan University during his senior season?

Bill Belichick led Wesleyan's lacrosse team as a senior while also playing football and squash, and his children Amanda and Stephen both went on to play the sport in college.

New Westminster's lacrosse club took its nickname from a rival fan's taunt about the bellies of which fish?

Salmon was a lowly food when the jeer was first shouted, but the players decided the belly was the best cut of the fish and kept the Salmonbellies name.

Which form of contact, legal in men's field lacrosse, is banned outright in the women's game?

Body checking is barred in the women's game, which permits only stick-to-stick contact, and that is why its field players wear far less protective gear than the men.

Lacrosse balls for the men's game are typically white; which colour is the standard for women's lacrosse?

Yellow is the women's standard, and the Premier Lacrosse League also uses optic yellow balls for its men's games because they show up better on television.

The NCAA men's lacrosse semi-finals and final are traditionally played over which holiday weekend?

Memorial Day weekend has staged all three games at one stadium since 1986, with a semi-final doubleheader on the Saturday and the title game on the Monday holiday itself.

In women's lacrosse, which restart has two opposing players flick the ball upward from between their sticks?

The draw opens the game and restarts it after each score: two players stand with the backs of their sticks together, and moving before the whistle is penalised as an illegal draw.

In the Premier Lacrosse League, a goal scored from outside the long-range arc painted on the field is worth what?

Two points is the reward, a rule that Major League Lacrosse had used before the PLL existed, with its own line painted 16 yards from each goal.

When a lacrosse shot misses the goal and flies out of bounds, who is awarded possession?

Team closest to the ball as it leaves the field gets possession, an exception to the usual rule that the ball goes against whichever side touched it last.

Which TV fitness trainer, famous for his 'Body by' exercise brand, co-founded Major League Lacrosse?

Jake Steinfeld had played lacrosse at Cortland State and could not believe so exciting a sport lacked a professional outdoor league, so he helped start one.

Early Indigenous lacrosse balls were carved from wood or made from which animal's hide, stuffed with hair?

Deer supplied more than the ball: craftsmen also strung the pockets of their sticks with netting made from the animal's sinew.

Which ice hockey great from Brantford, Ontario, said boyhood box lacrosse taught him how to avoid getting hit?

Wayne Gretzky scored 158 lacrosse goals at the age of ten, and later dodged hits so well that a rumour spread of an unwritten rule against hitting him.

As in ice hockey, lacrosse teams may swap players while play continues, a practice known as substituting how?

On the fly changes must pass through a marked substitution area, although after a goal or a penalty players may come and go freely.

Traditional Indigenous lacrosse contests between hundreds of men a side are recorded as lasting how long?

Two to three days was the usual span, with play running from sunup to sundown each day on a field that could stretch for miles.

Which extra card colour, beyond soccer's two, do women's lacrosse umpires show for delay of game?

Green is the delay-of-game card, and officials also use it to curb needless fouling and dangerous play in transition.

The Onondaga Nation, which holds lacrosse sacred, also knows the sport by which name?

The Medicine Game earned its name because the Onondaga credit lacrosse with healing power, and they still play it in its original form between clans or between young men and old.

Women's lacrosse adopted which feature of almost every field sport only in 2006, having long played without it?

Hard boundaries arrived only in 2006; before that the field had no fixed edge, and officials simply stopped play when the action drifted too far away.

Which country won the Women's Lacrosse World Cup in both 1986 and 2005, beating the host nation in each final?

Australia won both titles a long way from home, at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1986 and in Annapolis nineteen years later.

Ice hockey calls it a power play; what do men's lacrosse teams call attacking with a one-player advantage?

Man-up, also called extra-man offence, usually comes round three to five times per team in a game, while the penalised side sets up in a man-down defence.

Gary Gait's 'Air Gait', later banned in NCAA play, was a mid-air dunk over the crossbar after a leap from where?

Behind the goal is where he took off, landing on the far side of the goal circle, and the Gait twins also popularised behind-the-back passes and shots.

A men's field lacrosse team that leaves too few players on one side of the centre line commits which violation?

Offside in lacrosse is about numbers, not where a player stands: each team must keep at least four players in its defensive half and three in its attacking half at all times.

What is the top edge of a lacrosse stick's head, above the sidewalls and pocket, called?

The scoop is shaped for picking up ground balls, and since 2013 the NCAA has confined shooting strings to within four inches of it.

Which country hosted the 2018 men's World Lacrosse Championship, staging the games in the city of Netanya?

Israel took the tournament on little more than a year before the opening game, after Manchester, the original choice, withdrew as host in May 2017.

Which Midwestern university won seven NCAA women's lacrosse titles in eight years between 2005 and 2012?

Northwestern had revived its varsity team only in 2002, and when the first champions visited the White House in 2005 some players caused a minor stir by wearing flip-flops.

Darrell Rivers tries to make the school lacrosse team in the Malory Towers novels by which children's author?

Enid Blyton made lacrosse the school sport at Malory Towers, and the German editions of the books swapped it for handball to suit readers there.

Which lacrosse brand's founders made the first synthetic stick head, first used in a college game in 1968?

STX grew out of a plastics company whose lacrosse-playing staff wanted to open the game to the masses, and its head was the only type to score in the first NCAA championship.

What 1968 disaster at Chisholm, reputed maker of most of the world's lacrosse sticks, sped the move to plastic?

A factory fire destroyed the Cornwall Island plant, believed to have produced as much as 97 percent of the world's sticks, and the shortage that followed pushed players toward plastic.

Hollow metal lacrosse shafts are usually made in which cross-section shape, rather than round, for a better grip?

Octagonal is the usual shape for the hollow aluminium shafts that appeared in the early 1980s; lighter than wood, they made for faster stick movement, shots and passes.

The Tewaaraton Award for college lacrosse takes its name from which Iroquois nation's word for the game?

Mohawk elders gave the award their endorsement, and each winner takes home a bronze sculpture of a Mohawk player in action.

What does each player carry in the stickball of the Cherokee and other Southeastern nations?

Two short sticks with small, shallow pockets make catching very difficult, so the Southeastern game relied less on passing and more on throwing the ball toward the scoring pole.

When a lacrosse team clears the ball from its defensive end, what is the opponents' attempt to stop it called?

Riding falls mainly to the offensive players, who harry the goalie and defenders to deny them a free run or pass over the centre line.

In women's lacrosse, a shooter obstructed by a 'shooting space' violation is awarded which restart on the arc?

Free position shots are taken from the nearest hash mark on the arc, and a defender who keeps running into the shooting lane risks a card for repeat violations.

In traditional women's lacrosse, 'first home', 'second home' and 'third home' are roles in which unit of the team?

Attack roles are numbered outward from the opposing net, so 'first home' stands nearest to it, while the three matching defensive roles end with one called 'third man'.

Which NFL wide receiver played three years of college lacrosse at Penn State before a stint in the PLL?

Chris Hogan never forgot his first sport: in his on-screen introductions for televised NFL games he would cite Penn State's lacrosse programme rather than a football team.

Charlotte North, a two-time Tewaaraton winner, led which school to its first NCAA women's lacrosse title?

Boston College won that first crown with North setting an NCAA tournament record of 31 goals, six of them in the championship game.

Miles and Lyle Thompson, co-winners of the 2014 Tewaaraton Trophy, played college lacrosse at which school?

Albany's 'Thompson Trio' also included cousin Ty, and all three took the field wearing long braids in a traditional Native style.

Which coach won NCAA men's lacrosse titles with two schools, Princeton in the 1990s and then Denver in 2015?

Bill Tierney's Denver side was the first champion from outside the Eastern Time Zone, and the win took his career total to seven national titles.

Which school faced Manhattan College in 1877 in the first intercollegiate men's lacrosse game played in America?

New York University played that November 1877 game four years before the first college tournament, in which Harvard beat Princeton 3–0 in the final.

Which university's men won back-to-back NCAA lacrosse titles in 2023 and 2024, the second with a 16–1 record?

Notre Dame won the 2023 final 13–9 over Duke, the team that had beaten it 6–5 in overtime in the 2010 championship game.

Which 2012 film stars Brandon Routh as the reluctant coach of a reservation high school's struggling lacrosse team?

Crooked Arrows pits the reservation side against better-equipped prep school rivals, and real lacrosse stars and college coaches turn up in cameo roles.

Which California city hosted the 2023 men's World Lacrosse Championship, with Snapdragon Stadium as the main venue?

San Diego got the event only in January 2022, after the original Canadian host withdrew and the pandemic pushed the tournament back a year.

Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse, a women's league with weekly redrafted teams, crowned what kind of season champion?

A single player took the title, the one with the highest tally under a scoring system that also made each week's top four the captains who drafted fresh teams.

Who won the women's Tewaaraton Trophy in 2014, 2015 and 2016, becoming the award's first three-time winner?

Taylor Cummings first won as a Maryland sophomore, then the youngest woman to take the award, and no man had managed three wins either.

Which nineteenth-century painter of Native peoples depicted Choctaw stickball, a cousin of lacrosse, in his artwork?

George Catlin's 'Indian Ball Game' illustrates World Lacrosse's own history of the sport, and a Jesuit priest had described the Choctaw game as early as 1729.

Which Onondaga faithkeeper, once a decorated college lacrosse player, helped found the Iroquois Nationals team?

Oren Lyons played on an unbeaten college team alongside a future NFL great, and the Nationals side he started was first sanctioned by the Grand Council in 1983.

Which Hall of Fame attackman gave his name to a field lacrosse video game released for consoles and PC in 2016?

Casey Powell fronted the simulation from Big Ant Studios, and he later entered both the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and the professional game's own hall.

Which actress plays Poppy Moore, the Malibu teen who becomes lacrosse captain at a boarding school in Wild Child?

Emma Roberts's character later spots her late mother in the school's 1976 lacrosse team photograph and realises she had been a pupil there too.

Which Major League Lacrosse team was the only one carried into the PLL when the two leagues merged in 2020?

Cannons Lacrosse Club was the rebranded name the team took on arrival, while no other franchise from the older league made the move.