To utterly misquote F Scott Fitzgerald: “There are only second acts in American lacrosse.”
As the sport’s popularity grows, perhaps we are in sight of a new era in which pro lacrosse players and coaches make enough in salary and endorsements to commit full-time, teams play in dedicated stadiums (as opposed to college, even high school campuses), and teams practice multiple times per week allowing the strategic game to advance. I’d be interested to see that development in the game. I’d like to know what MLL caliber athletes could do with more sophisticated game plans and more time training together.
And yet, I hold tightly to what we have had.
As a coach of middle and high school students, I was thankful that our sport offered no lucrative professional options which might muddy the values of coach or player. It made the metaphor ‘lacrosse is life’ more, well, metaphorical. The lessons learned on the playing field of teamwork, perseverance, and integrity were always meant to be applied to other pursuits, always meant to contribute to the kind of man you’d be in your life and career after your playing days.
The metaphorical “second act” is and was perpetual reality; even the greatest players in our sport have eyed another profession as they played and studied in high school and college. This makes one’s college degree and college choice more meaningful. We are not a sport in which college is a way station on the road to the pros. Instead, lacrosse can open the door to some of the best colleges and universities in the country, for the purposes for which such institutions exist.
[Within that line of thinking, a NOTE: As a freshman and sophomore in high school, I had no idea which college I should attend. I am thankful that recruiting in the 90’s still meant you took your five official visits and could pick your college your senior year. I hope we get back to a time frame more like that.]
Much like the USCLA players before them (the battlers of the Mt Washington Lacrosse Club, Brine, Long Island Athletic Club, etc.), today’s players enter the highest level of post-collegiate lacrosse knowing it is not a career. But times have changed as well. Today’s MLLers are not weekend warriors; it is no beer league. The players train as professionals, but on their own time and dime; not at a team facility while being generously compensated.
Now to taint a lacrosse post with a baseball reference. Remember this bit of dialogue from Field of Dreams:
Ray Kinsella: Fifty years ago, for five minutes you came within... y-you came this close. It would kill some men to get so close to their dream and not touch it. God, they'd consider it a tragedy.
Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham: Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy.
Lacrosse is full of Moonlight Grahams, men who pursued their lacrosse dreams, and then pursued another. Young lacrosse players—pour your heart into the game, and through that struggle learn to pour your heart into other lives.
Jim Fenzel
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