On October 6th, members within the board of Oregon School Activities Association (OSAA) declared boys and girls lacrosse as a non-emerging sport within the state, voting to deny the sport as an official OSAA activity.
As lacrosse is typically more popular in eastern states, it has grown tremendously over the years on the West coast according to USA lacrosse.
The effort to make lacrosse an official sport in Oregon has been ongoing for multiple delegates within OSAA over the years. The recent voting result within the assembly was eighteen in favor and twenty three against for the sport to become official.
Within Oregon, there is known to be a total of eighty-one varsity lacrosse teams between boys and girls lacrosse. The high numbers of participants for the sport shows a clear emergence of the sport, but is still failing to gain the needed recognition to become an official sport.
As the reasoning behind lacrosse being denied as an official sport was that it was “non-emerging” and “unpopular”, the statistics of participation in the sport hinders the question of the true reasoning behind why lacrosse was denied, as it is clearly not due to “non-emergence”
“I feel disappointed. I feel like lacrosse is such a sport that’s been growing over the past couple of years,” mentioned senior Lanie Knight from the women’s varsity team. “I feel like we deserve some recognition”
Why does this matter? The denial of lacrosse becoming an official sport results in the further inconveniences of being a club sport.
“As a club sport, we don’t have access to as many financial resources as the other official sports,” said senior Kate Gabrielson from the women’s varsity team.
“For many schools I know, some students in their programs have to fundraise to pay the school for field time because it’s not supported by the school,” added senior Owen Vance from the men’s varsity team.
Other inconveniences, such as practice times, have been another consistent issue with our lacrosse programs at Jesuit.
“We’re still struggling to find practice times that work with students’ schedules,” said Vance.
This regarding that within Jesuit, the lacrosse programs are the only sport that has practice running until 9 pm.
“Lacrosse, being a club sport, unfortunately makes it more difficult to maintain coaches due to the extra responsibilities placed on them, like making the game schedule,” said Jesuit women’s varsity lacrosse coach Lauren Lakey.
Furthermore, lacrosse receiving the opportunity to become an official OSAA sport would essentially lead to a variety of benefits for the sport. But with these results, the lacrosse communities will continue to hold hope for the sport to grow and hopefully become an official OSAA sport.
“Becoming an OSAA sport would provide increased legitimacy and visibility, opportunities for growth, player development, and better integration with other school activities” mentioned Torrey.
The choice of declaring lacrosse an official club sport further disappointed our lacrosse community leaders within Oregon, the Oregon Girls Lacrosse Association (OGLA) for the girls and the Oregon High School Lacrosse Association (OHSLA) for the boys.
OGLA President, Britt Hartmann along with OHSLA Commissioner Will Harris sent a recent statement out to the lacrosse community regarding OSAA’s recent decision.
The two organizations have decided to take on new strategies to work toward becoming an official sport in Oregon.
“We have the opportunity to refine our strategy and try again for full sanctioning in the near future, if that is what our respective memberships decide.”
OGLA and OHSLA have stated a plan of creating more “try lax” events to introduce the sport to new players that can feed new and struggling programs. The organizations have also begun an effort to proactively introduce and integrate lacrosse in elementary and middle school Physical Education (PE) programs.
Also providing further assurance towards the lacrosse community, the statement mentioned “nothing will fundamentally change for our organizations or for the future of lacrosse in this state”
