Lacrosse began as the Creator's game among the Haudenosaunee and many other Indigenous nations, long before Montreal clubs wrote it into rules. These stories follow it from medicine games and vast ball grounds to hockey arenas, college championships and a return to the Olympics, with the people who shaped it: a dentist with a rulebook, a Mohawk box lacrosse star, the woman who brought girls' lacrosse to Baltimore, and a Haudenosaunee team that crosses borders on its own passports.
Every tile in a Lacrosse game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Origins
nine stories
1A game played for the Creator
On the tile: Medicine Game
To the Haudenosaunee, lacrosse is a gift from the Creator and a medicine game, played to heal and to lift the spirits of the people. Players traditionally fasted and prepared mind, body and spirit, because the game was played for the entertainment of the Creator. The tradition continues. Each spring, men of the Onondaga Nation play a medicine game with traditional wooden sticks, and the two sides are divided in a memorable way: men who are parents on one team, men without children on the other.
Haudenosaunee tradition ties lacrosse to creation itself. As some tell the story, Sky Woman fell to Earth and landed on the back of a great turtle, and the soil she spread there became the land many Native peoples call Turtle Island. Her daughter gave birth to twins, Sapling and Flint, who fought constantly, even in the womb. Sky Woman, raising the boys, decided they should play lacrosse to settle their disputes peacefully. It is one of several traditional stories about where the game came from.
A popular story says French missionaries named lacrosse because the curved stick looked like a bishop's crosier. The Jesuit Jean de Brébeuf did write in the 1630s of entire villages playing each other in games of crosse. But Brébeuf's own writings say nothing about a crosier, and scholars point out that French speakers of the time already used the phrase jouer à la crosse for any game played with a curved stick and ball. The name may simply have described the equipment.
Missionaries were not always fans. Beginning in the 1630s, Jesuits who saw lacrosse condemned it as violent and objected to the bets placed on games. The game carried on anyway. When French colonists took it up in 1740, according to the Smithsonian's American Indian magazine, they were no match for Haudenosaunee players. Later, the Mohawk at Saint Regis, a Jesuit mission, played ball games so often that the missionary complained the games interfered with attendance at church.
In a Cherokee story recorded by ethnologist James Mooney, the animals challenged the birds to a ball game. Two tiny four-footed creatures, mocked and driven off by the animals for being so small, asked to play for the birds. The birds made wings for one from the leather of a drumhead, creating the Bat, and stretched the other's skin to make the Flying Squirrel. The Bat dodged even the Deer and scored the winning goal. Mooney noted that Cherokee players invoked the bat and tied a piece of bat's wing to their ball sticks.
Traditionally, lacrosse was played by large groups on ball grounds in fields and woods. In 1834, a group of Montreal businessmen organized exhibition games at the racetrack in Ville Saint-Pierre, between seven-player teams from Kahnawake and Akwesasne. The Canadian Encyclopedia calls these the first urban, contained games. Montrealers soon learned to play from their Mohawk neighbors. The first recorded match between English-speaking players and Mohawk players took place on August 29, 1844, and the Montreal Lacrosse Club was formed in 1856.
Early accounts describe lacrosse on a scale no modern league could match. The two teams were equal in size, but the size itself varied with the players available, and teams as large as 1,000 were reported. The sides agreed on the field before play, and accounts vary widely: some fields ran 500 or 600 paces, others about a mile and a half, and some descriptions put the goals miles apart. There were no boundaries. Such games kept young men fit for hunting and war and could strengthen alliances.
In 1876 two teams toured Britain, one of Mohawk players from Kahnawake and one from Montreal, and played in front of Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. She found the game "very pretty to watch." The tour was also a show. The Kahnawake team wore blue caps with beadwork and red feathers, and between games the Indigenous players staged mock war dances, a deliberate stereotype that drew British crowds. The Montreal team won three-quarters of the matches, which suggests to one historian that some were staged.
Many Canadians long believed that Parliament made lacrosse the national game in 1867. The claim came from William George Beers, the sport's tireless promoter, and it became a myth both long and widely held. There is no evidence Parliament did any such thing. The real law came much later. In 1994 a member of Parliament introduced a bill naming hockey the national sport. After much debate it was amended, and the National Sports of Canada Act made hockey the national winter sport and lacrosse the national summer sport.
William George Beers began a dental apprenticeship in Montreal in 1856, and in 1860 he played goal for the Montreal Lacrosse Club in a match before the visiting Prince of Wales. That year he published a brochure laying down rules for the game, including field size, the distance between goals and the number of players. In 1867 the new National Lacrosse Association adopted his rules. Beers became a leading Canadian dentist and first dean of the Dental College of the Province of Quebec. His writings also reflected the prejudice of his era, claiming Indigenous players could never play as scientifically as the best white players.
Jim Brown is remembered as a Hall of Fame running back, but in 1984 he told The New York Times, "Lacrosse is probably the best sport I ever played." At Syracuse he was a midfielder and a two-time All-American, in 1956 and 1957. As a senior he scored 43 goals, second in the nation, as the team went 10-0, and he scored five goals in the first half of the 1957 North-South All-Star Game. In 1983 he became the first African American inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Oren Lyons of the Onondaga Nation was the All-American goalie on Syracuse University's undefeated 1957 lacrosse team. He went on to become a faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, an artist, a professor and an international advocate for Indigenous rights. In 1983 he and Rick Hill co-founded the Iroquois Nationals, a team representing the Haudenosaunee in international competition. "Without lacrosse," Lyons told an anthropologist in 1985, "the Six Nations would have withered and dried and blown away."
Louisa Lumsden was the founding headmistress of St Leonards School in St Andrews, Scotland, though she left the post in 1882. In 1884 she watched a match in Canada between Caughnawaga (Kahnawake) players and the Montreal club and thought it "beautiful and graceful," and the school took up the game. Its first recorded match, on March 27, 1890, was played with teams of eight, and it started only once the missing ball was found. Teams grew to 10 players by 1895 and 12 by 1913.
Gaylord Powless, a Mohawk player from Six Nations of the Grand River, was the oldest of 14 children and held his first lacrosse stick at age two. As a teenager he moved to Oshawa to play for the Green Gaels, where a young Bobby Orr was a classmate and friend, and he led the Gaels to four straight Minto Cups from 1964 to 1967. He retired with exactly 1,000 points in senior and professional play. A wooden stick man to the end, Powless called plastic sticks "tupperware."
Édouard Lalonde got his nickname, Newsy, while working as a reporter and printer for the Cornwall Freeholder. He became a hockey star, a member of the Montreal Canadiens at their start in 1910 and a four-time scoring champion. Yet The Canadian Encyclopedia calls him the best lacrosse player of his generation. He was in demand across Canada, a Vancouver team paid him $6,500 for one season, and he was later voted Canada's outstanding lacrosse player of the first half century.
7Two brothers who shared college lacrosse's top prize
On the tile: Thompson Bros.2014
College lacrosse's highest honor, the Tewaaraton Award, takes its name from the Mohawk word for the game, yet no Native American player won it until 2014. That year it went to two: Miles and Lyle Thompson, Onondaga brothers who played for the University at Albany. Both had broken the NCAA single-season points record, Lyle with 128 and Miles with 119, and it was the first time the award was shared. Lyle won it again in 2015. On the field, the brothers shouted directions to each other in Mohawk.
Gary Gait grew up in British Columbia and had never heard of Syracuse until he tried out, while still in high school, for Canada's national team. He did not make it, but the national coach called his friend Roy Simmons Jr., Syracuse's coach, about Gary and his twin brother, Paul. At Syracuse the twins popularized behind-the-back passing and scoring, and Gary was named college lacrosse's most outstanding player in 1988 and 1990. Decades later he coached the Syracuse women for 14 seasons, winning more than 200 games, then took over the men's program.
Alfie Jacques of the Onondaga Nation felled shagbark hickory from nearby forests and broke it apart with an axe and a mallet, then shaped each crosse on a carving horse, steamed it above a fire, bent it around a form, shellacked it and wove in the gut webbing. He learned the craft from his father, Lou, and together they worked out a system for identifying the right trees. He kept no template and no written instructions. Jacques worked this way for six decades, and he never stopped carving with his father's knife, made in 1832.
1The patent that promised a stick that would not shatter
On the tile: Plastic Head1970
A patent filed in 1967 by Wm. T. Burnett & Co. and granted on April 21, 1970, described a new kind of lacrosse stick. It noted that sticks had almost always been shaped by hand from wood, usually hickory, by the Indigenous peoples with whom the game originated. The new head was molded from a urethane elastomer meant to be tough and shatterproof, on a handle that could be replaced if it broke. Mass-produced plastic and metal sticks of that era, a lacrosse museum archivist says, made the game faster and raised scoring.
In 1930 Colin Chisholm, then teaching on Cornwall Island, teamed up with Frank Roundpoint to start a small lacrosse stick company. It grew into the world's largest supplier of lacrosse sticks, and the stick makers of Akwesasne once made most of the world's sticks. In 1968 a disastrous fire destroyed the factory. Without the high output of Mohawk-made sticks, synthetic sticks gained ground. Wooden "woodies" made of hickory have since made a comeback, valued for their strength, long life and history.
The earliest lacrosse balls were wooden, and one early description said the wooden ball was shaped more like a turkey's egg than round. Wooden balls were later replaced by balls of deerskin filled with fur. William George Beers, who wrote down rules for the game in Montreal, swapped the deerskin ball for one of hard rubber. By 1985, a Penn Museum article noted, the rules called for a rubber ball weighing 5 to 5 1/4 ounces.
Box lacrosse was developed in Canada in the 1930s to make use of hockey arenas that sat empty in summer. It caught on fast. The Canadian Lacrosse Association adopted box lacrosse in 1932, and that October the first indoor Mann Cup, the senior national championship, was played at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Teams play six a side, with rebounds off the boards and a 30-second shot clock. Many Haudenosaunee players took up the indoor game and, as an Oneida Nation council member wrote, made it their game.
Among the Haudenosaunee, a first lacrosse stick can arrive long before a first step. A small cradle stick is traditionally given to boys at birth. Akwesasne Mohawk stick maker Jack Johnson made one in 2019 for the Smithsonian's Native New York exhibition, crafted from wood, leather and rawhide and just under 24 inches long. Traditional sticks are still given to children while they are in the crib, and Onondaga player Miles Thompson told NPR in 2014 that you are given a wooden stick when you are born.
Long before nets, the goal could be a single pole. Rick Hill, a Tuscarora co-founder of the Iroquois Nationals, has described old Haudenosaunee games in which players had to hit one pole with a leather or wooden ball. Later, two forked poles were set in the ground with another pole laid crosswise between them. The Choctaw game worked in a similar way: a goal post called a fabvssa stood at each end of the field, and teams scored by hitting the post with the ball.
Early lacrosse had no clock. According to early accounts, teams decided before play how many goals were needed to win, and a game could go on for days: play ended at dark and began again the next morning. Rick Hill has said old Haudenosaunee games were played until one team scored three goals, and Choctaw games could last for days until a set score or time limit was reached. Limited periods of play appear to have come into use only in the early 19th century.
In college lacrosse a FOGO, short for face off, get off, is a specialist whose job is to win the face-off, get the ball to a teammate and leave the field. No rule creates the position; teams adopted it once coaches saw what a dominant face-off player could do. Denver's Trevor Baptiste set the Division I career record for face-offs won in 2018 with 1,158. In 2020 Yale's TD Ierlan passed it by a single win. In 2019 Ierlan had won every face-off in a game against Harvard.
Sixes, created in 2018, is a compact version of lacrosse that sits between the field and box games, with quick transitions and high scoring. It was designed to grow the sport around the world, create greater competitive balance and cut the cost and complexity of playing and staging events. It needs less equipment and space, and it does away with specialty positions. Men and women played sixes at The World Games 2022, and the first World Lacrosse Sixes Championships are planned for 2027.
Before 2028, lacrosse had been an official Olympic sport only twice, and the first time, at St. Louis in 1904, just three teams took part. Two came from Canada: the Winnipeg Shamrocks and a team from southern Ontario entered as the Mohawk Indians. The third was an American team. A fourth entry, the Brooklyn Crescents, never played. The matches were held at Francis Field on the Washington University campus. The Shamrocks won gold, the Americans silver and the Mohawk team bronze.
Three teams entered lacrosse at the 1908 London Olympics, but South Africa withdrew, leaving Canada and Great Britain to decide the title in a single game at White City Stadium. Canada won, its second Olympic gold in the sport. Lacrosse has not been an Olympic medal sport since. It did return as a demonstration in 1928, 1932 and 1948. In 1932 the United States was represented by the Johns Hopkins University team, which played three games against a Canadian all-star team at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The International Olympic Committee has approved lacrosse for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles, where men and women will play sixes. Six men's and six women's teams will compete from July 24 to 29 at Exposition Park Stadium, after a qualifying path expected to involve about 100 teams. One question hangs over the event. Olympic eligibility typically requires a recognized National Olympic Committee, and the Haudenosaunee Nationals, a full member of World Lacrosse representing the game's originators, do not have one. World Lacrosse says it is seeking a pathway for them.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy issued its first passport in 1923, and the Iroquois Nationals were used to traveling on them. In 2010 the team planned to play at the World Lacrosse Championships in Manchester, England. The U.S. secretary of state granted a one-time waiver so the passports would be accepted on the players' return, but British officials refused to accept them, and the team did not compete. It was dropped to last in the world standings. After two appeals, the Nationals returned to the top division in 2014 and won bronze.
In 2015 the Iroquois Nationals hosted the World Indoor Lacrosse Championships at the Onondaga Nation, near Syracuse. Sovereignty came onto the floor with them: some non-Native Canadian players refused to have their passports stamped at the Onondaga Nation's offices. The Nationals reached the final and took silver behind Canada. It matched a pattern. Canada had won every world indoor title since the event began in 2003, and the Nationals had finished second each time, once losing the final in overtime.
Among the Haudenosaunee, lacrosse was traditionally seen as a men's game, and the ceremonial medicine game is played by men. The success of the Iroquois Nationals inspired Haudenosaunee women to form a team of their own, which the Federation of International Lacrosse officially recognized in 2008. Passports proved a hurdle for them too: in 2015 the under-19 team withdrew from the world championships in Edinburgh. In 2017 the women traveled to England on their own passports to play in the Women's World Cup.
7A college prize that asked permission for its name
On the tile: Tewaaraton2001
Since 2001 the Tewaaraton Award has honored the top men's and women's college lacrosse players, and it is often called the Heisman of lacrosse. The University Club of Washington, D.C., chose Tewaaraton, the Mohawk word for lacrosse, but first had to receive permission from the Mohawk Nation Council. The trophy, by sculptor Frederick Kail, shows a Mohawk player in bronze on a six-sided base, one side for each of the Six Nations. The ceremony is held at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
8A gold trophy that was stolen, ransomed and burned
On the tile: Mann Cup1910
In 1910 railroad entrepreneur Donald Mann donated a trophy for Canada's amateur lacrosse champions. The Mann Cup is solid gold, though low-karat, and for years it sat almost unnoticed in the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame. Then a 1989 newspaper story drew attention to it, and thieves broke in and took it. As the story goes, the insurer paid $10,000 to get it back, minus a piece cut from the bowl. Its replica had troubles too: in 2004 it fell into a bonfire at a Peterborough Lakers celebration.
Brothers Paul and Mike Rabil launched the Premier Lacrosse League with an unusual plan. Instead of tying teams to home markets, the league would tour. Its first season opened in Boston in June 2019 and moved on to a dozen more cities over 14 weeks. In December 2020 the PLL merged with Major League Lacrosse, which had played since 2001, and the Boston Cannons joined as the PLL's eighth team. The touring league eventually settled down, at least partly: beginning in 2024, each of its eight clubs was assigned a home city.