"Is there icing?" one guy in the bleachers wanted to know. “’Cause it sure looks like ice hockey.”
A team dad turned around and handed the man a program for the game being played under the lights on Maloney Field. “Here,” the father said. “Read this.”
It’s true. The program handed out at women’s lacrosse games contains a guidebook, designed to uncloak a sport that is still something of a mystery for many West Coast spectators. The flyer includes answers to Frequently Asked Questions (“Yes, the players must stop on the whistle” and “No, there are no hard boundaries”) and a diagram of the soccer-size field that sketches out the crease, hashes, 8-meter fans and restraining lines.
“The most typical question we get is, ‘Is that field hockey?’” says head coach Michele Uhlfelder, a U.S. national team member since 1991. “But hockey’s a ground game, and we’re trying to move the ball down the field in the air, with the same speed as you’d see in an ice-hockey puck.”
The mustard-yellow balls often sizzle past helmeted, thickly padded goalkeepers at 75 to 80 miles per hour. But do the other 10 players on the field wear protective gear? Nah. That’s for the men’s game, which allows some stick and body contact.
Lacrosse is one of the fastest-growing women’s sports in the nation, with 40 new college varsity teams added since 1995. And Stanford aims to be the flagship West Coast program. “Our goal is to qualify for the NCAAs and help grow the game nationally,” Uhlfelder says. “We’d like to put a stick in everyone’s hand at a young age.”
A former vice president of the U.S. Women’s Lacrosse Association and current board member of USLacrosse, Uhlfelder was a four-year starter at the University of Maryland and played in World Cup competitions in Japan and England. She coached at Duke and Old Dominion before coming to Stanford two years ago, when she led the Cardinal to a fourth straight Western Women’s Lacrosse League championship.
But this year the varsity women withdrew from the WWLL, which included college club teams, and played in a new federation. Spearheaded by Uhlfelder, the Mountain Pacific Lacrosse League includes four Division I teams—St. Mary’s, Denver, UC-Berkeley and Stanford—and Division II UC-Davis. The Cardinal women won the first-ever MPLL conference title with a perfect conference record of 10-0 (11-7 overall). If the new league can add two more varsity teams—UCLA and USC are good candidates—it will become a viable ncaa conference.
“We played more East Coast teams this year, and I think we turned some heads,” says team co-captain Liz Britt, ’02, a New Jersey native. “Right,” adds Katie Grube, ’04. “We showed that West Coast lacrosse is becoming something to take seriously.”
The women meditate on the field before each practice, but once they turn their attention to scoring goals, they shift into warp speed. Cradling the ball in netted racquets with titanium shafts, attackers throw lightning-fast passes behind their backs and dart behind the goal to feed scoring shots. Defenders sprint like crazy to double-team the player who has possession of the ball, yelling “Ball! Ball!” in her face to help their teammates keep track of where it is in the blur of runners.
The varsity women are keen on the history of their game, which most closely resembles the Native American stickball contest that was used to settle tribal controversies. Players would compete for weeks at a time on fields that were several acres wide and long, using trees for goals, tree limbs for sticks, and dung-and-deerskin balls.
Lacrosse originated with tribes in the eastern half of North America, which helps explain why the powerhouse schools in the sport are still mostly on the Eastern Seaboard. But as Stanford’s national standing continues to improve, Uhlfelder is finding more athletes “who are interested in schools beyond the Mississippi.” This year, Stanford also hosted the first deBeer East-West Challenge, inviting Syracuse University out to play on Parents’ Weekend before a crowd of about 600. The Cardinal lost, 15-9. But, as they do after every game, the team members ran to the sidelines and clapped in appreciation of their supportive fans in the bleachers.
