Lacrosse Club
Lacrosse is a team sport that is played by ten players (men) or twelve players (women), each of whom uses a netted stick (the crosse) in order to pass and catch a very hard rubber ball with the aim of scoring goals by propelling the ball into the opponent's goal.
The team scoring the most points after 2 halves of varying length from competition to competition, and overtime if necessary, wins.
It is commonly assumed that the name stems from the French term "crosse", for the shepherd's crooklike crosier carried by bishops as a symbol of office.
Lacrosse has witnessed great modifications since its origins in the 1400s, but many aspects of the sport remain the same.
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In the Native North American version, each team consisted of about 100 to 1,000 men on a field that stretched from about 500 to 800 yards with some fields being a couple of miles long.
Rather than having traditional goals where the ball has to pass through goal posts, many of the Native teams used a large rock or tree as their goal. They would hit the deerskin ball against the goal to earn points.
If the ball was somehow destroyed during gameplay, the lowest-ranking member of the tribe would be sacrificed and his head was used as the ball. The medicine-men acted as umpires, and the women urged on the men by beating them with switches. These lacrosse games lasted from sun up to sun down for two to three days. These games were played to settle inter-tribal disputes and also used to toughen young braves in preparation for future combat.
The game became known to Westerners when a French Jesuit Missionary, Jean de Br¨¦beuf, saw the Iroquois Natives play it in 1636. In 1763, after Canada had become British, the game was used by the Natives to carry out an ingenious military deception.
On the 4th of June, when the garrison of Fort Michilimackinac (now Mackinac) was celebrating the king's birthday, it was invited by the Ottawas, under their chief Pontiac, to witness a game of "baggataway" (lacrosse). The players gradually worked their way close to the gates, when, throwing aside their crosses and seizing their tomahawks which the women suddenly produced from under their blankets, they rushed into the fort and massacred all the inmates, lest a few Frenchmen.
By the 1800s, lacrosse evolved to become less violent and more of a sport as French pioneers began competing. In 1867, W. George Beers, a Canadian dentist, codified the game, shortening the length of each game and reducing the number of players to ten per team.
The first game played under Beers' rules was at Upper Canada College in 1867, with Upper Canada College losing to the Toronto Cricket Club by a score of 3-1. By the 1900s, high schools, colleges, and universities began playing the game, and lacrosse was contested as a medal sport in the 1904 and 1908 Olympics.
Welcome to Lacrosse Club, a site dedicated to the fun and entertainment of the fantastic lacrosse sport!