Oregon Ducks

[DEAD!]

Girls Lacrosse is a finesse sport... if you want to call it a sport

Men's Lacrosse is the real deal

Yes, women's lacrosse is a sport... last I checked

[Armadillo]

Man, it's a good thing my wife isn't reading this...she HATES when sports have different rules for women than the men do. Says it makes women look weaker and such. I can't say I disagree, but it's really not my fight. Sooooooo...

Yeah, they look hot.

[Waleslax]

They don't hit, there is no checking, and since they use sticks with no pockets, they really can't throw the ball with much velocity. Additionally, lacrosse helments are somewhat heavy.

From the pictures posted above it looks like a normal lacrosse stick that has pockets. I think you are thinking of field hockey?

BTW: Kansas does use the Trajan numbers and wordmark on all of the athletic teams. They are trying to be more unified. At first I hated it, especially on the men's basketball team, but they have grown on me. (I am sure that winning the national championship in them didn't hurt any either)

Let's see... I've played top Nationally ranked high school lacrosse, D1 lacrosse, pro lacrosse (NLL), and now play club lacrosse. My sister is currently playing D1 womens lacrosse. Yeah dude, I'm pretty sure I know what I am talking about. Womens lacrosse sticks, as per their rules, are not allowed to have any pockets. Mens pockets are allowed to be about as deep as the ball. What this means is that the pocket on a womans stick has to be flush with the bottom part of the plastic. On a man's stick, the leather and mesh can be looser/deeper. This allows more control when being hit as well as for the ball to be thrown significantly faster. I've had my shots clocked in the low to mid 90's. My sister is a goalie. I can assure you that she never sees a shot remotely near that fast.

So, to re-iterate, yes, I am sure I know the difference between womens lacrosse and field hockey.

[totc]

A few misconceptions about lacrosse have been printed here. Let me try to set some of them straight, as one who has been to 16 Final Fours.

Women's lacrosse, as played before 1990, was pretty much the same game the men played before 1900. No helmets or pads, 12 players a side, no offside rule, an infinite boundary around the field where the player who got the ball either on a shot or was closest to when it left the effective playing area (i.e., was in better position to retrieve it from the nearby forest) got the ball on the restart.

Men's helmets and faceguards and gauntlets (thick leather gloves) started appearing around the turn of the century. The "freeze tag" rule where you had to stay in place on a dead whistle was taken out of the game, IIRC, somewhere between 1930 and 1950. The sticks were heavy and wooden back then, but metal came into the game in the 60s and 70s.

The sticks on the women's side were wooden, too, until Harvard coach Carol Kleinfelder came up with the Brine Cup for the women -- a metal-shafted stick with a plastic head. In 1989, a couple of her players, including forward Charlotte Joslin, were using them. Joslin's stick and strings were yellow, the better to hide the ball. The next year, Harvard won the NCAA championship.

In 1994, the University of Maryland showed up with metal sticks with yellow molded heads and strings and won the first of seven straight NCAA titles. Close to the end of that run, however, Maryland stars Jen Adams and Quinn Carney were seen in the 2000 championship game with white sticks instead of wooden ones. The manufacturers hadn't made yellow ones yet, but they eventually came to be the standard in the lacrosse head: the offset, which moved the wall of the stick an inch or two off the stick's central axis, allowing a player to put a lot more velocity on the ball.

By 2004, with lacrosse balls flying out of sticks faster than ever before, the rulesmakers put eyewear on every player from the national-team level all the way down to the grade schools. It is in this atmosphere in which Northwestern has flourished, winning NCAA titles in 2005, 06, and 07, using the offset to their advantage.

Other rules have changed over the last 10-12 years, including the addition of a hard boundary and an offside rule by which players can only attack the other goal with seven players, and only seven outfield defenders can drop behind its 35-yard-line.

In addition, I haven't seen a whistle for a dangerous shot at a goalkeeper in a long time, which is kind of odd, given what happened at Rutgers a few years ago when a female goalkeeper was sidelined with multiple concussions after absorbing numerous blows to the head from lacrosse shots from the men's team during informal workouts.

The problem, according to the Journal of Athletic Training, are the helmets. Over the last 15 years, as the hard-shelled Cascade and their ilk have taken hold, there have been numerous career-ending concussions and serious head injuries not only in the NCAA, but in pro lax.

The men's field lacrosse helmet (as well as most used by women's goalies) used to be an oversized baseball cap with a face guard and ear flaps:

Look at the crown and how it is vented. Think of thin plastic or leather as the shell rather than harder plastic, and that was the standard helmet for years until players started getting hurt from charging into other players with their heads down. I know of one goalie who broke his neck with his head down after charging for a loose ball.

The women have resisted helmets because of the traditions of "baggataway" and that helmets would lead to gloves and to padding, and eventually to full-body contact which would lead to colleges recruiting physical freaks instead of skilled athletes.

The talk these days is about whether the offset stick prevents a defense from being able to take the ball away from the offense with a fair check, even if the pocket is shallower than the width of the ball. It is possible that U.S. Lacrosse may ban the offset soon, but we'll see.

[-kj]

Let's see... I've played top Nationally ranked high school lacrosse, D1 lacrosse, pro lacrosse (NLL), and now play club lacrosse. My sister is currently playing D1 womens lacrosse. Yeah dude, I'm pretty sure I know what I am talking about. ...

So, to re-iterate, yes, I am sure I know the difference between womens lacrosse and field hockey.

You know, you could have explained the difference without being a tool.

[Sport]

They don't hit, there is no checking, and since they use sticks with no pockets, they really can't throw the ball with much velocity. Additionally, lacrosse helments are somewhat heavy.

From the pictures posted above it looks like a normal lacrosse stick that has pockets. I think you are thinking of field hockey?

BTW: Kansas does use the Trajan numbers and wordmark on all of the athletic teams. They are trying to be more unified. At first I hated it, especially on the men's basketball team, but they have grown on me. (I am sure that winning the national championship in them didn't hurt any either)

Let's see... I've played top Nationally ranked high school lacrosse, D1 lacrosse, pro lacrosse (NLL), and now play club lacrosse. My sister is currently playing D1 womens lacrosse. Yeah dude, I'm pretty sure I know what I am talking about. Womens lacrosse sticks, as per their rules, are not allowed to have any pockets. Mens pockets are allowed to be about as deep as the ball. What this means is that the pocket on a womans stick has to be flush with the bottom part of the plastic. On a man's stick, the leather and mesh can be looser/deeper. This allows more control when being hit as well as for the ball to be thrown significantly faster. I've had my shots clocked in the low to mid 90's. My sister is a goalie. I can assure you that she never sees a shot remotely near that fast.

So, to re-iterate, yes, I am sure I know the difference between womens lacrosse and field hockey.

what team?

[FirearmofMutiny]

Can't tell from the photo, but those don't look like the exact same numbers - the football team's numbers taper inward at the bottom in a try-to-make-the-linemen-look-slimmer forced perspective.

I dunno...looks like there is some tapering.

And note how see-through that white one is!

[Steve-O]

This isn't uni related, but why no helmets for ladies lacross? I kinda doubt they're flinging a nerf ball around.

They don't hit, there is no checking, and since they use sticks with no pockets, they really can't throw the ball with much velocity. Additionally, lacrosse helments are somewhat heavy.

...

Girls Lacrosse is a finesse sport... if you want to call it a sport

Men's Lacrosse is the real deal

Hahaha. Play box lacrosse and let me know what the real lacrosse is.

They are all sports, just different levels of intensity and physicality.