Marginal Game

THE DUBIOUS COMFORT OF PERMANENT MARGINALITY

Let’s face it; lacrosse is a marginal game in Canada. Low registration numbers and poor visibility.

Hockey, soccer, baseball and football are not marginal games; they have high number of registered participants and permanent visibility. Everyone in Canada knows of those sports; very few know about lacrosse. Fewer even know that lacrosse is Canada’s national sport.

Here are the facts.

In 2024 lacrosse had only 51,131 registered players 76% of which are under the age of 17; we are a large day care center for minors!

9% of our membership is over the age of 21; you got it right 9% of our membership are adults!!

We have no registered players playing recreational lacrosse as we don’t have recreational programs for adults. Nothing to even compare with pickleball which everybody seems to play these days. Probably because there is a recreational program for adults in pickleball.

We have 10 national championships for 51,131 players; this represents 10.7% of our budget.

We have 8 National Teams for 51,131 players; this represents 43.4% of our budget.

We have a 10 person staff representing 26.1% of our budget spending 13.7% of the said budget on administration.

And we have 9 Board members legally and politically in charge of all this.

Over the years we have, in terms of registration, grown very little in the last 20 years. Our numbers tend to slightly move from one year to another, but never significantly because we have no national plan nor real will to increase the number of our registered players.

We are comfortable with the little operations that we have; we are happy amongst ourselves; we come together to debate or fight over relatively insignificant issues and fail to see our global situation; we are not concerned with the state of the game; we are fixated on our limited topics or matters who we think are of worldwide importance.

We love to hate each other and cherish the opportunities to come together and disagree as if disagreement was a sign of important existence and of self- esteem. We live happily with our leaderless leaders who proudly carry on within the frontiers of our comfortable marginality. We show up and fight and finally proudly leave happy to have existed and somehow found a place under the sun. As a good loser.

How can a national association go from 43,375 players in 2003 to 51,131 in 2024 (that is a 17% growth in 20 years) and not realize that it is going nowhere. How can it not see that other sports all have a national development plan to increase the number of their players while we are slowly walking thinking we are going forward.

How can we not see that the number of women has been increasing is every other sport while in lacrosse women only represent 6.4 % of our membership. In 2024 there were 3316 registered women playing field lacrosse; and listen to this there were 182 senior aged women playing field lacrosse; yet we have a National Team of which we are all very proud. Clearly, we are missing the boat; a National Team for 182 registered players emerging from 2 provinces (Manitoba and Nova Scotia); 9 provincial associations have registered 0 senior aged players and yet the 2025 National Team will be made up of players from Ontario, BC and Alberta! Help me with this.

I sense and fear a general resistance from the lacrosse communities with women in our sport; we are comfortable with ourselves and yet have to address the issue because of the political and social pressure to increase the number of women in the game; so, we have addressed the issue and left it to rot! Who will step up to help everyone realize that our comfort is our paralysis.

Hey this is a wakeup call.

Lacrosse Canada needs to open doors to others not to generate fights between members. Lacrosse Canada needs a comprehensive national plan to increase the number of registered players. If we had 120,000 members, for example, we might have better leadership, greater visibility, significant competitions and championships and National Teams where players would emerge from provinces other than BC, Ontario and Alberta. But we are doing nothing to significantly, with the provinces, help increase the number of players. In November 2025 we will find out what the new number of registered players will be; but we will have had no plan to determine what we wanted it to be.

Lacrosse Canada needs to penetrate the school system both in the academic field and in the technical field. Can we imagine if every kid in school had heard of lacrosse through its Aboriginal heritage, had made research on lacrosse or even produced papers or texts on the game. But for this to happen requires a plan on how to penetrate the school system, on how to deal with the provincial Ministries of Education and then the school boards and the history, geography or social science teachers’ associations. Aboriginal leaders and lacrosse historians could well prepare the content of a short course and make it available to schools. Imagine if all this was done now, before the 2028 Olympics, when every teacher in the nation will be in need of material to help students appreciate the games that will be played in Los Angeles. And lacrosse has so much to offer…

But this can only be done if we all go out of ourselves, if we let bygones be bygones and collectively engage with others in an open-door attitude that is kilometers away from the actual closed doors and close shop approach to our game and its administration.

I fear we are missing the boat with the 2028 Olympics as we are doing also with the 2025 Canada Games; what have we done so far to benefit nationally and provincially from our presence within the Canada Games?

Our comfort amongst ourselves has led us nowhere as if we feared strangers or newcomers who might challenge our ‘’way of life’’ and our general understanding on how the game should be played and governed. We are daily shooting ourselves in the foot and are glorifying non-significant events or successes.

Let’s all take a step back and challenge ourselves; let’s reassess what we think are our successes and start looking differently at what the game could be if we only had a plan to develop it nationally.

Have a look at Lacrosse Canada’s strategic plan (strategic pillars) and tell me if you think that someone somewhere is telling us that we are on our way to register 120,000 players one day!