Lacrosse

A detailed Summary of Lacrosse

Lacrosse is one of many varieties of stickball games being played by American Indians when Europeans began coming to America. Almost totally a male team sport, it is different from the others, like field hockey or roller hockey, by the use of a netted racquet with which to pick the ball off the ground, catch and 'throw' it into or past a goal to score a point. The rules of lacrosse are simply that the ball, with few exceptions, can not be touched with the hands.

Early info on lacrosse, from missionaries like French Jesuits in Huron country, is vague and often different from source to source. Their information is mostly about team size, equipment used, and the length of games and length of playing fields but say very little about stick handling, game strategy, or the rules of play. The oldest sticks are from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and the first detailed reports on Indian lacrosse are even later. George Beers provided good information on Mohawk playing techniques in his Lacrosse (1869), while James Mooney in the American Anthropologist (1890) described in detail the "Eastern Cherokee Ball-Play," including its legend, rituals, and the rules and preparation for play.

Given the little amount of info and vaguen

Meanwhile, the spread of non-native lacrosse from the Montreal area eventually led to its position today worldwide as one of the fastest growing sports (more than half a million players), controlled by official regulations and played with manufactured rather than hand-made equipment-the aluminum shafted stick with its plastic head, for example. While the Great Lakes traditional game died out by 1950, the Iroquois and southeastern tribes continue to play their own forms of lacrosse. Oddly, the field lacrosse game of non-native women today most closely resembles the Indian game of the past, retaining the wooden stick, without the protective gear and specific sidelines of the men's game, and tending towards mass attack rather than field positions and off sides (that's what the game should be all about right?). In conclusion lacrosse is a decent game with an expansive background and requiring great skill (and courage... could u imagine getting smacked in the head with one of those wooden balls!?).

Lacrosse was given its name by early French settlers and explorers, using the generic term for any game played with a curved stick (crosse) and a ball. Native language, however, describe more the technique (Onondaga DEHUNTSHIGWA'ES, "men hit a rounded object" *grunt*) or, especially in the southeast, to show the game's aspects of war strategy ("little brother of war"). There is no evidence of non-Indians taking up the game until the mid-nineteenth century, when English-speaking Montrealers adopted the Mohawk game they were familiar with from Caughnawauga and Akwesasne (tribes), attempted to "civilize" the sport with a new set of rules and organize into amateur clubs. Once the game quickly grew in popularity in Canada, it began to be exported thro

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1178
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Sports