Tips on covering lacrosse

Depending on what level of lacrosse it is, often times the players are just happy to get the coverage.

 

Like hockey, it's a beautiful game that not many people can play.

Oh, walk the sidelines if you can. Get as many stats as you can from the team managers. Read a gamer or two off of Google before you go.

And many of the girls playing will be very good looking. Can't speak for the guys.

Guys Lax is about contact.
Girls Lax is about control.

 

So it's sex, then.

 

Shut down the board for the day. No one's beating this.

 

Pet peeve: If somebody scores three goals, don't call it a hat trick. Three goals isn't that unusual in lacrosse, for one thing, and for another, I've never seen anybody throw hats onto a lacrosse field, indoor or out.

 

Dammit, I just got booed off the stage, and deservedly so.

 

AND ONE!

 

Think about it being similar to basketball. On offense they work for open shots by whipping the ball around the perimeter and making the defense move. Guys will flash in front of the goal and there are pick-and-roll type plays. Defenses might play either man-to-man or zone. You'll see more zone if the defense is a man down because of a penalty.

I still have trouble determining what's a legal hit and what's not, but it's a fun game. Faceoffs are a huge key. Teams that have a great faceoff guy (coaches and players might call him the fogo) can hang with teams that are more talented everywhere else because they keep the ball out of the hands of the opposing offense.

 

Be sure to check the police scanners.

 

In my experience, lacrosse players -- male and female -- have been some of the best athletes to interview. Sure, you get some spoiled rich snots, but that's overblown and hardly exclusive to lax.

 

Boys/men's lacrosse, if played well, is probably my favorite high school sport to cover, next to football.
Girls lacrosse is barely a sport. I'd rather cover field hockey.

 

I used to cover boys and girls lacrosse. They are different in many ways -- example: 12 players a side in women's, 10 a side in men's -- but the basic idea is the same. I knew nothing about the sport before being thrown on the beat, but quickly grew to love it. It's sort of like a combination of basketball and hockey on grass. (Especially the men's version, which allows checking.) A lot of the same principles from those sports apply: the importance of possession, moving without the ball, transitioning from offense to defense (fast-breaking, basically), substitutions on the fly. So if you have an idea of how to watch basketball and/or hockey, you'll have a decent sense of what you're watching in lacrosse.

Some of the language and rules and technical aspects are unique, of course, but the more games you watch, the more you'll pick up. A couple of examples, off the top of my head: The guys with the long poles are the defensemen, who mark the other team's attackmen. And FOGO stands for "Faceoff, get off," and refers to a player whose specialty is winning faceoffs (but may not be that good at anything else, and thus quickly gets off the field after faceoffs).

Those are specific to men's lacrosse, though. Women's lacrosse sticks are all the same -- no long poles. And the action starts with a draw, rather than a faceoff, although it's just as important, because, as I said, possession is very important. One thing that always frustrated me about girls lacrosse was the officiating; very often I couldn't figure out why the refs were blowing the whistle. But the coaches -- who knew the rules -- usually had the same complaint.

Whether you're covering boys or girls, ground balls is a key stat, because it tells you who was coming up with loose balls and controlling possession. And, echoing Jake_Taylor, most of the coaches and players I dealt with were pleasant to deal with and happy to answer my stupid questions.