Three days after the Millard West boys lacrosse team celebrated its championship, Will Gilner still wasn’t thrilled about the look of his lawn.
Outdoor chores tend to suffer from neglect more often in the spring, when Gilner spends seemingly every free minute planting seeds to help his favorite sport flourish in the city he now calls home.
By all accounts, Omaha looks like fertile ground for a game that’s sprouting across the country.
“Everywhere I go, the grocery store, the bank, I talk about lacrosse — just in case I meet somebody who might have an interest or a background in the sport,” said Gilner, a Maryland transplant who coaches the club teams at both Millard West and Creighton.
“And I’m meeting more and more people here every year who do.”
It’s been less than a decade since lacrosse began to take root in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa. Ten years ago, you’d have been hard-pressed even to find a lacrosse stick in an Omaha sporting goods store.
But the options for anyone bent on getting involved seem to be exploding.
The YMCA in Omaha offers recreational and instructional leagues for boys and girls in grades four through eight. There’s an adult men’s team in Omaha for former college players who aren’t ready to retire.
Most prominent universities in Nebraska and Iowa — including Nebraska, Creighton and the University of Nebraska at Omaha — field men’s club programs. Many colleges also have women’s teams.
This year, more than 200 players competed on high school club teams for Millard North, Omaha Creighton Prep, Millard South, Millard West, Papillion-La Vista and Omaha Westside.
And while there isn’t yet an organized high school club league in Nebraska for girls, there’s been a surge in boys prep lacrosse around the Omaha metro.
The Nebraska High School Lacrosse league first took the field in 2005 with about 80 players spread out among four teams.
This year, Omaha Creighton Prep, Millard North, Millard South, Millard West, Papillion-La Vista and Omaha Westside fielded varsity club teams. With more than 200 players in the league now, four of the programs for the first time were large enough to form junior varsity squads. Organizers next hope to bring an Omaha Public Schools team into the mix for 2008.
“It’s amazing how fast it has grown,” Millard South coach Tom Meyers said. “Last year we had about 20 kids on our team. This year it was about 40 — and I’d say there were about 60 total who were interested in playing but couldn’t come out for one reason or another. It seems like there are a ton of kids now who want to play, and we’re trying to make sure there’s a way they all can.”
The increasing participation in lacrosse locally mirrors what’s happening around the country.
According to a recently published survey by US Lacrosse, the number of people playing the sport has increased 68 percent since 2001. A nine-page April 2005 spread in Sports Illustrated trumpeted the one-time niche sport as the fastest growing game at all levels in the U.S.
“I think there are lots of reasons that so many people are getting into lacrosse,” said Andrew Valenta, president of OMALAX, the Omaha Metro Area Lacrosse Association. “But mostly, I think it’s growing simply because it’s so much fun to play.”
For those unfamiliar with the sport, lacrosse looks kind of like hockey, football and soccer rolled into one.
Players wear helmets, shoulder pads, gloves and shorts, and they carry netted sticks to pass, catch, scoop and shoot a hard rubber ball. The objective, just like in hockey and soccer, is to score goals into a guarded net.
The people who promote lacrosse say their fast-paced game has everything that makes other sports popular — without many of the perceived drawbacks.
With fewer pieces of equipment to purchase, the game is less expensive to play than hockey. There’s lots of contact between players in boys and men’s lacrosse, including the occasional vicious open-field hit. At the same time, most regard lacrosse as a less dangerous game than football.
Many of the offensive and defensive strategies of lacrosse are similar to the sets and schemes run by basketball teams. Unlike in hoops, however, lacrosse players don’t necessarily have to be tall to stand out.
“There’s a place for every athlete in lacrosse — both the little guy with speed and quickness and the big guy with size and strength,” said Jared Widseth, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound senior defenseman at Millard West. “I think it’s a perfect hybrid of the hitting of football and the high scoring of basketball.”
Certainly, the ball finds the net during a lacrosse game much more frequently than it does during a soccer match — which often can be all but decided when one team takes a lead with as many as 10 minutes left on the clock. In lacrosse, the final few minutes can feature bursts of goals and wild swings of momentum.
Widseth, who will continue his lacrosse career next year at Tri-State University in Indiana, is the first known Nebraskan recruited to play the sport for an NCAA program. That’s one good indication, area coaches say, that the skill level of local players is getting better each year.
“A couple of years ago, the teams that could scoop the ball the best seemed to have the most success,” said Creighton Prep coach Steve Haney, whose teams won the first two Nebraska prep lacrosse tournaments. “This year, Papillion and Millard West were great fast-break teams. The passing has reached the point where it’s a faster game now.”
The ball got rolling on Omaha’s lacrosse scene in 1999, when Brian Anzur and Pat Kelsey formed the Creighton club team. Most of the organizers currently involved with high school lacrosse have ties to the program.
The first Creighton squad was made up of students from other parts of the country who had prior experience playing the sport as well as some locals who had returned to Omaha after being exposed to the game in various other states.
In the early 2000s, members of the Creighton team also got involved in the fledgling YMCA youth programs. In turn, when those kids reached high school age, the base had been built to create Omaha’s prep teams.
The area’s founding fathers dream of lacrosse ultimately becoming sanctioned by the Nebraska School Activities Association — although the game still appears far off the NSAA radar.
For one, lacrosse hasn’t yet taken off in other parts of the state the way it has in Omaha. And NSAA Executive Director Jim Tenopir said no member school has even initiated the required legislative proposal to kick-start the process of getting lacrosse sanctioned.
“I don’t know how widespread the access is to lacrosse in the state,” Tenopir said. “On the national level, we definitely are hearing that it’s one of the fastest-growing activities. A lot of our sister states across the Midwest do sanction lacrosse, but here we haven’t yet seen the interest from our schools.”
And even though the popularity of lacrosse is swelling, that doesn’t mean the sport’s organizers here have stopped knocking themselves out promoting it. It’s still difficult to find experienced coaches and officials, and Omaha’s prep teams receive varying levels of support from their schools.
“Everything is self-funded, and we are completely reliant on volunteers at this point,” said Gilner, the Millard West coach who will stay busy well into July as he helps run Creighton’s first high school lacrosse camp. “Becoming visible still is a chore for us; it’s a big challenge.”
At the same time, Gilner said, the scene at Tranquility Park on June 2 offered a glimpse of lacrosse’s potential in Nebraska. On the night Millard West edged Creighton Prep for the NHSL title, the gathering of 300-plus fans included rabid and vocal student sections supporting both teams.
They screamed and cheered, chanted and jeered. When it was over, the crazies dressed or painted in green stormed the field to take part in Millard West’s celebratory mob.
And, like you might see during any high school football game across the state, the stars of the future could be seen honing their skills on the sidelines. Instead of tossing around the pigskin, however, these boys passed and scooped lacrosse balls while perfecting their stickwork.
“That night was so great — it definitely had a ‘Friday Night Lights’ kind of atmosphere,” said Millard West’s Widseth. “Obviously, football is always going to dominate Nebraska. But I think lacrosse is really going to catch on. It really could become the sport here during the spring season.”
