Lacrosse-camp attire ranged from girlie to gnarly. Midfielders in T-shirts boosting “Michigan Lacrosse” and “Seattle Prep LAX ” flew past in pastel blues and yellows, wielding color-coordinated sticks. Goalkeepers in gray “Die Hard Lacrosse” Ts, with skull motifs, stood their ground fearlessly.
“I’ve always maintained that it’s an awesome game,” says Michele Uhlfelder, head coach of women’s lacrosse—or “lax,” in the widely used shorthand of the game. “It encourages a wide range of athletes to play since you can be really agile and have fast stick work, or be a bit slower-footed but really tenacious and tough. What’s amazing to me is that we’ve got kids who’ve never played before whose parents are willing to send them to an overnight camp to learn the game.”
Since she launched the girls’ four-day, $500 camp in 2001, Uhlfelder has seen enrollment more than quadruple, soaring from 40 the first year to 185 this summer. It’s one of 31 camps Stanford coaches offer (which typically draw more than 8,000 players), and its popularity reflects a national trend that Sports Illustrated spotlighted in a nine-page article last spring: “A longtime niche sport, lacrosse is the fastest-growing game in the U.S.”
Girls flock to Uhlfelder’s camp for many reasons. Most are looking for a level of coaching that they can find only on college campuses. Many want to improve a particular aspect of their defensive or offensive play. Some simply want to learn the game.
Then there are what the NCAA calls “prospects”: high school players who tour the summer circuit of college camps, including those at Dartmouth, Brown and Wesleyan University, hoping to be scouted by varsity coaches. “You get to see their talent, how they compete, how they assimilate new information, how they react in your environment, under your coaching,” Uhlfelder says. Prospective recruits, in turn, “get to experience and ‘live’ Stanford for a few days. They spend time evaluating us and our team, and they try things on—eating in the dining halls, practicing on our field.”
Laurel Black, a senior at Friends School of Baltimore, came to camp from the heart of laxland. She has played defense for eight years and has a reconstructed anterior cruciate ligament to show for it. High school freshman Christine Jacobsen stands at the other end of the lax spectrum. A native of Pacifica, on the Northern California coast, she has played only two years of middle school lacrosse, and will find no team at the high school she starts this fall. “So she’s hoping to start a club,” says her mom, Laurie.
Two hours after they checked in, Black and Jacobsen were watching varsity players throw risers and backhand shots at sophomore Laura Shane, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation goalkeeper of the year. (Her 204 saves led the Cardinal to a 13-5 overall record and the conference title last year.) “How do you fake someone?” Uhlfelder asked the group. “Maybe with a sidearm release.” How to approach a ground ball? “Read the bounce and attack it.” And that funny little motion where you scoop the ball off the ground and cradle it back and forth in the stick pocket while you run? That would be “walking the dog.”
By day, campers were assigned to skill groups that took their names from the counselors’ e-mail addresses—such as laxplayas and goldilax—and at night they competed on teams named for surfboard companies. Like many of the 15 varsity players who taught at the camp, sophomore Katharine Fox had once been a camper herself. “I came the summer before my senior year, because Stanford was one of my top choices,” Fox says. The weather was a draw for the Maryland native, but she’d also heard about Uhlfelder’s hands-on approach. “At other camps, the directors are more aloof,” Fox says. “But Michele actually coaches skill groups.”
Campers toured the campus, dipped into the swimming pool, looked forward to watermelon breaks and practiced for a talent show. But mostly they put in long mornings and afternoons on the field, learning how to set picks and follow through on rocket shots. And there, they got what they came for. “How do you win?” Uhlfelder queried. “By scoring. You gotta have a shot to have a game.”
