Lacrosse, eh?
They may not have infiltrated the sport the way Eastern Europe rules women's tennis, but Canadian high schoolers are getting a closer look from NCAA men's lacrosse programs throughout the nation, coaches say. It's a trend that is reintroducing Canada to the outdoor game - which originated near the Great Lakes - and creating new incentives for Canadian players to make themselves known in the U.S.
"I've seen [Canadian] players for a few years now and the difference is just night and day," said Drexel coach Chris Bates, who had a pair of Canadians on his roster last year and will add another in 2010. "There are guys that can obviously play; they've grown up with a stick in their hands since they were four, five years old."
But it's not the same stick they are wielding, nor the same game they are playing.
Canadian youngsters typically grow up playing box lacrosse, a smaller version of the American collegiate game. With a field consisting of an iceless ice hockey rink, a team of five "runners" and a goalie, a 30-second shot clock and a drastically shrunken goal, box lacrosse emphasizes stick skills and deemphasizes athleticism.
"We start developing our off hand a lot later," said Michael Thomas, an Ontario Under-19 All-Star midfielder whose team recently played games at Drexel and Cortland State to get exposure to U.S. college coaches in advance of an Adidas-sponsored cup game in Orlando, Fla., this winter. Thomas is currently completing a post-grad year and will play for Colgate next season.
"It seems like every time we come down here, the Americans are a lot faster," he said. "We just have a little more inside game."
Rosters of the seven Ivy League men's lacrosse programs (Columbia has no team) show a total of seven Canadians - one each at Harvard and Dartmouth, and five at Cornell. Penn has none, but coach Brian Voelker said that getting players from north of the border has indeed been on his mind for a while. His staff looked at one recruit from the same U-19 team on which Thomas played, although the student ultimately chose to take a post-grad year.
"We look at kids from everywhere. The days of having a roster full of kids from Baltimore and Long Island are done," Voelker said, adding that the NCAA was sprinkled with famous Canadian players even two decades ago, when he was playing at Johns Hopkins.
"But the last couple of years there has been a pretty big influx of Canadian kids," he said.
High-school sports are not a hot ticket in Canada, partly because many of the best athletes are hockey players who compete at the junior level. Canadian universities have relatively weak athletics programs.
And because, rightly or not, box lacrosse players are associated with scoring virtuosity, most Canadian NCAA players were recruited to their schools as attackers, the two coaches said.
The most visible Canadian presence in men's lacrosse next year may come from the brothers Matt and Mark Cockerton, who are the sons of Stan Cockerton, the former North Carolina State great. (Like many players who commit to college programs early, the Cockertons declined invitations to tour in the U.S. this fall.)
Bates said that for every lacrosse athlete that gets noticed and pursued by an NCAA coach, there is another that doesn't, purely by chance.
"There are some [Canadian] clubs that will come down and play, but not enough," Bates said. "They need more exposure to get college coaches to see them, because there are a lot of them."
Voelker added: "It's easier for us to go watch kids from Philadelphia. It's tougher to see guys from California or Texas, and it's the same thing with these Canadian kids."
