Memorial Day weekend approaches, and besides solemn tributes to those who died in active military service, in Maryland that means traffic congestion, the beginning of the summer beach season and the Final Four. And not the big round ball Final Four (that basketball business was almost two months ago, non-sports fan), but the men's and women's NCAA Division I college lacrosse Final Four, which is being held this year just up the road in Philadelphia.
To suggest Maryland is the center of the lacrosse world is to simply state the obvious. No matter which teams emerge victorious this weekend, you can be confident it will include players from Maryland, as every team has them. The University of North Carolina Tar Heels may have made the Final Four in both the men's and women's side, but there are actually more Marylanders on those squads combined than there are North Carolinians (by quite a bit).
And that's not even counting the three Maryland teams — Loyola University Maryland and the University of Maryland on the men's side as well as the University of Maryland women. The Terrapins are the top seed in both brackets, incidentally. There are other lacrosse hotbeds, of course (Long Island and New Jersey allegedly produce more Division I college players), but rarely has one state dominated championship play as Maryland has this season.
For years, the Maryland lacrosse community has taken pride in such accomplishments and the notion that lacrosse is the nation's fastest growing sport. Yet there are signs that such success is waning and that the evolution of lacrosse from an East Coast sport to a national one may be more aspirational than inevitable despite the 2015 season's milestone event — the men's championship won by the University of Denver, the first school west of the Mississippi to claim the Division I title (by beating the University of Maryland, as you may recall).
Last year, nationwide participation in lacrosse at the youth, high school, college and post-college level hit 800,000 for the first time, but that was only 2.2 percent more players than the year before, the slowest growth in lacrosse participation since US Lacrosse started tracking it in 2001. Ten years ago, participation was growing at a double-digit pace, but for the last several years it's been no higher than 3.5 percent.
Admittedly, participation rates in youth sports generally have widely been in decline. Some studies have suggested that the high cost of organized athletics deserves at least some of the blame. Lacrosse, in particular, is often associated with higher income households (as any lacrosse parent can tell you, the cost of equipment from sticks and helmets and other various forms of protective gear can be significant). One study found the majority of households where youngsters play lacrosse at the elementary school level had incomes of $100,000 or more.
But here's the other danger sign for the sport — people aren't watching the games as they did in the past either. The 2015 NCAA men's championships (including the Division I semifinals and finals and Division II and III finals) drew 72,897 spectators, the lowest number since 2002. At the peak of popularity, those same games attracted 123,225 (when they were staged in Baltimore). But even conducting the finals in Baltimore is no guarantee of success — only 78,234 attended in 2014, the last time they were held in Charm City.
So where does that leave lacrosse? Even if participation rises, it's difficult to see lacrosse establishing itself in the nation's sports psyche if the number of spectators who bother to show up for its biggest event continues to decline. It could be like soccer of a generation ago when even the most ardent participants couldn't name a professional player beyond Pele. There is professional lacrosse (Major League Lacrosse, a semipro league), but it features just nine teams with average attendance of less than 4,400, and that, too, has been shrinking since 2011.
We happen to think lacrosse is a great game — the "fastest sport on two feet," as the marketing pitch goes — but that may be our Maryland bias. It clearly has hurdles to overcome (it's still a sport that lacks racial diversity, for instance), but the biggest of all might be public indifference. Is there a buzz about championship weekend? Perhaps it depends on which circles you travel. College lacrosse fans can be as fanatical as any — but not necessarily as abundant.