Lacrosse Casts Its Net Farther From the Coast, and Pulls In New Recruits
When my son was born, my in-laws, Long Islanders, showed up with a baby gift: a miniature lacrosse stick. As a Midwesterner, I had never seen one, but I figured it was the Northeast equivalent of putting a baseball glove in the crib.
What little I knew about the game came from acquaintances on Wall Street. Many of them had parlayed their stick skills at Ivy League or Mid-Atlantic colleges into personal connections that led to spots on trading desks, where it can be hard to swing a lacrosse stick without hitting a former attackman.
So it came as little surprise that the Ivy League chose New York to host its conference tournament this year. Yale and Cornell will meet at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at Columbia in Sunday’s final. The league saw Columbia, and New York City, as a near-perfect laboratory to explore neutral sites for its season-ending event, which in previous years had been held on the home field of the regular-season champion.
Khan first saw the sport as an eighth grader while walking through Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, and stopping to watch a game. He had just lost his brother to a drug overdose and was, by his own admission, lost. He was shy, overweight and not terribly athletic.
“I wanted to be part of a team, and it looked like a sport I could be good at,” Khan said. “But when I went to the store and saw the equipment and how it cost more than $100, I didn’t think it was achievable.”
By chance, Khan discovered CityLax was offering a summer clinic — equipment included — run by coaches culled from college lacrosse programs as well as Wall Street. The sessions were demanding. The coaches were relentless.
But Khan stayed with it. He went to every clinic CityLax offered and played for its club team. Now he plays attack for James Madison High School in Brooklyn, another program backed by CityLax. Last semester, he was honored as a scholar-athlete by the P.S.A.L. He has accepted an academic scholarship to St. Francis College in Brooklyn.
“When I first started playing, I could barely do a push-up or look someone in the eye,” said Khan, now a solid 5-foot-9, 185-pounder. “Now I have options and know that there are even more out there.”