Lacrosse: Basketball with sticks

Mike Johnson remembers being approached by a buddy in the eighth grade with a brand new idea.

“He told me, ‘You gotta play lacrosse, man. It’s like football but you get to hit people with sticks.’”

To a defensive tackle, that sounded like heaven.

But Johnson also lived in Tennessee, not exactly a hotbed for this on-the-run, catch-and-throw game of skill. But he stuck with it for one reason.

“It’s more intense than any other game,” said Johnson, a senior and Catawba College’s leading scorer this season (26 goals, 8 assists). “In football, you take breaks and you have a huddle. In lacrosse, you’re running the entire game.”

Johnson and his teammates come from practically everywhere. Peter Bourque, the eighth-year coach, has players from New York to Maryland to Ohio to St. Louis to the mountains of North Carolina.

Several came to Catawba for other reasons and walked on. Some, like Robert Arnold, came from state championship lacrosse teams in Baltimore.

And they all agree. If you just watch lacrosse once, you’ll be hooked.

Area fans may have one last chance this season to catch the lacrosse fever — today when ranked Wingate visits Frock Field at 4 p.m.

“It’s one of the most exciting sports I’ve ever seen,” said attacker Demetrius Chirgott, a junior who hails from Hagerstown, Md. “To me, it’s just a beautiful thing.”

Bourque thought the same when he applied for the Catawba job almost a decade ago. A Massachussets native and former player at Guilford College, he gave up a position with Reebok when the Catawba job opened.

“I wasn’t starting with a lot of resources,” he remembers. “We were the red-headed stepchild, let’s face it.

“I had four guys who had never played. I had guys putting pads on their knees. It was wacky.”

Catawba’s first team was 0-10 (“I expected that,” Bourque said). But the determined coach worked the phones and several clinics and now has a competitive team in the Deep South Conference, a league that produced the defending national champ in Limestone.

The Deep South is made up of Catawba, Wingate and Mars Hill of the South Atlantic Conference, along with the CVAC’s Limestone, Pfeiffer, St. Andrews and Lees-McRae.

“The competition is really good,” said Chirgott.

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But the crowds are not. And that frustrates the Indian players. If only you’d give lacrosse a try, they all plead.

“I look at our football crowds and think, ‘Wow, that’s what we need at lacrosse games,’” dreams Johnson of 4,000-plus throngs.

Big crowds do show in certain areas but lacrosse at the moment is very much regionalized. Long Island, Maryland, Northern Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania are giddy over the sport. Last year, the Pennsylvania Scholastic Lacrosse Association had 4,000 fans attend its playoffs. Little kids weren’t behind the bleachers playing cup ball. They were tossing balls back and forth with their sticks.

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The game originated on Indian reservations centuries ago. It is physical, there is constant movement and much to the delight of many fans, there is plenty of scoring. A 22-15 final is not unusual. You can bang opponents to the ground with your stick (Johnson’s favorite part). The ball is made of Indian rubber and it’s smaller than a tennis ball.

“It’s like basketball with sticks,” explained Bourque. “Except you can go behind the goal.”

“It’s a lot of finesse and a lot of thinking,” Chirgott added.

With the stick, it looks like a chore to score.

“It’s just like throwing a baseball,” Bourque said. “You have your hand over your head and the release point is by the ear. You snap and follow through.”

Many Division II players are self-taught. Some, like Chirgott, grew up with the sport.

“I’m from western Maryland where it isn’t as prominent as other places,” he said. “But my dad grew up in Baltimore and played all his life. So when I was young, I had a stick. I went to camps before I played on a team.”

Chirgott was being recruited by several schools in the Deep South Conference. But he was offered academic money by Catawba, checked the school out and was ecstatic that lacrosse was here.

Despite a current record of 3-9, he is confident of the future.

“The talent has been here for a couple of years,” Chirgott said. “We’ve just had some tough breaks.”

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And then, there’s mountain man Joshua Pruitt, a 5-11, 200-pound senior defender. He comes from Hendersonville, not quite the lacrosse capital of the world.

“Being from there, I knew nothing about it,” he laughs.

But several lacrosse players were on his hall and told him he looked like a lacrosse player. When injuries took their toll his freshman year, he moved into the starting lineup and never came out.

“I played three sports in high school and I take a little from all of them,” Pruitt said. “It’s rough like football but there’s a lot of running like soccer.”

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Chirgott has 16 goals and 12 assists, while Mike Delabar, of St.Louis, has 16 goals and a team-leading 21 assists.

It seems as if they all have the same goal while here in Salisbury — put Catawba on the lacrosse map, but also, promote this sport in their little part of the south.

Remember, if you watch just one game ...

“All of my friends who have come to watch say, ‘Iwish I had played,’” said Pruitt. “They say, ‘Iwish I had known about it because it’s a great game.’”

Pruitt then lets out a big grin.

“I tell my parents I wish I was from Maryland so I could’ve played lacrosse for 10 years.”

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Ronnie Gallagher is the sports editor of the Post.