Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.Seven years ago, Tyler Bailey was a youth soccer player. And he was dissatisfied.
He’d played soccer for most of his 11 years, but what he truly longed for was a contact sport. His dad signed him up for hockey, but that didn’t quite quench his sporting thirst.
After one practice, one of Bailey’s friends told him he was going to lacrosse practice. Bailey agreed to tag along.
And he found the game he’d been searching for.
“I’d never really heard of (lacrosse), being from Nebraska,” said Bailey, now an 18-year-old graduate of Lincoln Southeast. “We got out there, and I saw it was similar to hockey. It was a full-contact sport. It was honestly one of the funnest games I’ve ever played.”
Stories like Bailey’s are becoming more and more common in Nebraska. The increase in popularity figures to be evident in the upcoming Cornhusker State Games, which will include lacrosse for the second year. Lacrosse director Joe Meyer said he expects at least a 25 percent increase in participants this year.
“Last year was year one, and the first year of anything is always the hardest,” Meyer said. “Now that we’ve gotten year one out of the way, people are starting to realize that it’s legit.”
Lacrosse continues to be one of the fastest growing sports in America. It traditionally has been an East Coast sport, as just one team ranked in the top 15 of the final NCAA poll wasn’t an East Coast school. But that university, Denver, made the Final Four, defeating perennial power Johns Hopkins. And more Midwestern schools are responding to the sport’s popularity. Michigan recently became the third member of the Big Ten to add the sport.
Meyer is a part of that movement. He grew up and played high school lacrosse in New Jersey. He played collegiately and spent four years in the pros before moving to Omaha, where he assumed his days with the sport were over.
But as lacrosse’s grip tightened on Nebraska, and Omaha in particular, Meyer’s role grew. He became president of the high school league and was approached last year to become the sport’s director for the Cornhusker State Games. Meyer said he’s more involved with lacrosse now than when he lived on the East Coast.
“The Midwest is kind of the last frontier for lacrosse to really explode,” Meyer said. “Omaha lacrosse in the last four or five years has really proven itself to be legitimate and deep. I think that has really contributed to the Cornhusker State Games saying, ‘We recognize that this is a big sport and that it’s really starting to get going here in Nebraska.’ We’re just trying to give it a shot.”
When play begins on July 23, Bailey will take the field with the Lincoln Rampage, a team made up mostly of the same guys he won the championship with a few months ago in high school.
Lacrosse is not yet a sanctioned sport in high school, but schools can participate at the club level. Eight teams took part in the Nebraska High School Lacrosse league this spring. No Lincoln school alone was able to fill a roster, so players from multiple Lincoln high schools converged to form the Rampage.
“(Lacrosse) could be sanctioned if it was just Omaha,” Meyer said. “When you look at the state as a whole, before it becomes sanctioned, you really need to see the growth out towards North Platte and Grand Island. In order for us to gain traction, we need more expansion out west.”
But Meyer is quick to add that such growth may not be far away. He pointed out that the Lincoln team started just four years ago, and now the Rampage are the state champions.
“That just tells you how fast it can grow and become successful in an area,” Meyer said. “If we can get one or two teams from Grand Island or North Platte to have the success that Lincoln did, I think that’s probably the biggest step we need to take to become a sanctioned sport.”
For now, the sport and its participants are content with where they stand. Many believe that expansion will come with more time and more exposure. It helped Bailey, who plans to play on the club team at Nebraska this fall, finally find his perfect sports role.
“I play crease defense, so my main job is to make sure people don’t come into the crease and get an easy goal,” he said. “I’m pretty much the intimidating factor, trying to make people shoot from the outside so it’s a harder shot and an easier save for our goalie.”
The sport’s Midwest expansion is aided by the rise in publicity for lacrosse recently. ESPN recently aired the NCAA championships and has also begun to show Major League Lacrosse games.
“Even 10 years ago when I moved out here, people were like, ‘Is that the game with the stick and a ball?’ ” Meyer said. “Now people are like, ‘Oh, lacrosse. I saw that on TV.’ It really makes the parents a little more comfortable letting their kids play.”
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402-444-1201, sports@owh.com
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