With burgeoning participation numbers, lacrosse showing staying power in Duluth area
Cooper Carlson has seen lacrosse’s image change the past couple of
years. The Duluth East sophomore says there’s more talk about the sport
at school and more students show up at Duluth-Superior Chargers games.
By:
Rick Weegman, Duluth News Tribune
Cooper Carlson has seen lacrosse’s image change the past couple of
years. The Duluth East sophomore says there’s more talk about the sport
at school and more students show up at Duluth-Superior Chargers games.
“It’s
a lot more popular this year,” he said. “More people are asking about
what the rules are, how we play it and when we have games.”
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| #5 Cooper Carlson |
Carlson,
a midfielder in his second year of participating for the Chargers’ boys
club team, hopes the sport eventually grows from the club level to
become a high school varsity offering.
“I’d love to see it as a
varsity sport before I graduate, but that’s kind of far-fetched,” he
said. “It just started getting big in the last year.”
Carlson hopes his younger brother, seventh-grader Wyatt, will have that opportunity in the future.
Lacrosse’s popularity with the youth is such that Duluth Denfeld athletic director Tom Pearson says it’s an inevitable outcome.
“I
don’t think it’s a question of ‘if’ but a question of ‘when,’ ” Pearson
said last week. “The first question we’re going to ask is, ‘Do we have
the numbers of Duluth public school students to run a varsity lacrosse
program?’ ”
The local lacrosse association has yet to devise a
long-term plan for taking that step. The Chargers, a member of the
Minnesota Boys Scholastic Lacrosse Association, are comprised of 108
players in grades 5-12 from six area school systems. A spinoff club team
in the East school district, where a preponderance of players reside,
is the most likely first move.
“Probably the next step for us is
to stay in the club division and form a third high school-level club
team in the Twin Ports,” Chargers first-year president Brad Mackinaw
said, referring to a Proctor club team that began this spring.
With Duluth schools facing budget crunches and potential layoffs, adding a sport would be a hard sell right now.
“The
big question always is money,” Mackinaw said. “How are they going to
come up with the money to afford that and how are they going to come up
with the resources in an environment where they are getting their
budgets cut?”
The Chargers operate on a $17,000-a-year budget, of
which $7,500 is paid to the district to rent Public Schools Stadium for
practices and games. That budget does not factor in transportation costs
— players are required to find their own way to home and road games.
Approximately 90 percent of the budget comes from players, who pay $300
up front. That budget would increase greatly as a varsity sport,
considering road games usually would require a trip to the Twin Cities
area.
Pearson equates the situation to when Duluth added soccer in
the early 1990s. At that time, the district said the sport’s proponents
needed to fund-raise a certain dollar amount and then re-examined it in
later years to see if interest was still there. Start-up money needs to
be there before the district agrees it’s a viable option, Pearson says.
“With
the funding right now, we’re not going to be in a position to say,
‘We’re going to add a $25,000 program, or whatever that number turns out
to be, to the school district,’” he said.
Other factors must be considered as well, including Title IX issues and competitive play.
Federal
law stipulates equal opportunities exist for boys and girls programs if
the interest is there.
But at the moment, the girls’ club program, the
Nighthawks, doesn’t have nearly the same numbers as the Chargers so that
probably wouldn’t be an impediment to adding a boys program.
Whether
a Duluth team could compete against Twin Cities suburban schools that
have a longer lacrosse history and much deeper youth programs is a
legitimate question.
“The majority of our players started playing
in the eighth or ninth grade,” Mackinaw said. “When you go to schools
like Eden Prairie and Eagan and Benilde-St. Margaret’s — schools that
dominate lacrosse — a lot of those kids first pick up a stick in the
fourth or fifth grade. Do we want to jump to the next level of
competition, knowing that we’re not going to be competitive in that
situation? Those are questions we haven’t resolved yet.”
Chargers coach Scott Wishart, a former Minnesota Duluth player, doesn’t believe jumping up a level is the immediate answer.
“Right
now we’re pretty new compared to a lot of programs from the Cities,
especially if we were to split all our talents among the high schools,”
Wishart said. “Those other teams have had club lacrosse for many years
and playing varsity-level lacrosse for five or six years. They’re very
developed in the Cities. It will take some time for this program to
catch up.”
Even by drawing talented fall and winter sports
athletes, local lacrosse teams would be hard-pressed to find similar
depth as more advanced rivals.
“There are very good teams
throughout the state that are in club-level lacrosse,” Wishart said. “As
far as the sake of our sport, right now, we should continue to proceed
at this pace and keep developing players.
“It’s something we’re
going to have to wait out and keep working on. Until we can have a
larger interest and more players out here, I would think we’re in (a
club level) for a few years at least.”
