I apologize for the cliched headline, but it was the clearest thing I could think of after I saw a piece by ESPN's Quint Kessenich in Inside Lacrosse that lamented the sport’s very pale status as it noted February 13′s opening men’s varsity game by Hampton University. It’s the first historically black college to launch a Division I lacrosse program, an event that inspired SportsCenter to broadcast from the school that day. From Inside Lacrosse:

A 2010 NCAA study reported that just 1.9 percent of Division I lacrosse players were black and that fewer than 10 percent were nonwhite. …

“In order for this great game to take off, there’s got to be a continuous dialogue about how best to make this game accessible and appealing to the largest audience possible,” Chazz Woodson, a former collegiate star at Brown and in Major League Lacrosse, wrote in a Lacrosse Magazine piece in 2012. “Anything short of that makes lacrosse simply a glorified social club, with membership requirements that some people will inherently never meet, and that others will choose not to buy into.”

That’s the problem. Lacrosse is stunted because of the membership requirements. It favors those with money.

The game has shifted from a high school-based sport to being club-centric. Club programs come with a hefty price tag. They have too often replaced cheaper recreational programs, and players are being recruited out of summer tournaments, not in-school games during the spring.

Lacrosse isn’t the first sport to be whitewashed because it became club-centric and prohibitively expensive for many families. Baseball is a notable example of this phenomenon, though as I pointed out in this previous piece, you can look at the yearbook pictures at my children’s very diverse high school and figure out which sports are the most travel-team-centric at the earliest ages. Hint: they’re the sports with mostly white people in the pictures.

However, lacrosse is unique in that it seems to have perpetuated a system that makes the sport designed exclusively for the upper crust, and in fact hascolleges and corporations that use lacrosse as a way to determine who they’d like to admit to their realms (and in the case of colleges, attract monied donorsin exchange for allow their children to call themselves college athletes by playing non-scholarship lacrosse).

 

The growth model, intentionally or not, for lacrosse is built on white people who have seen their kids squeezed out of more mainstream sports and were happy to realize they found an activity that could ensure their children could hobnob and make connections with only the best. It’s an example of a phenomenon The Economist pointed out in a 2015 article — the upper-income bracket taking advantage of systems in such a way that income inequality only gets greater. It’s not that you can or should blame families for taking advantage, but The Economist makes the point that the overall result is that if you can’t take advantage, you’re in trouble, and by extension the country is in trouble, too.

I’m sure that everyone involved on the coaching and organizing side of the sports of lacrosse is hoping that Hampton has success on the field, and as a recruiting tool to get more nonwhites to participate in the sport and help keep it growing. I’m not sure everyone else will be quite so welcoming. Things are just fine for them.