Jovan Miller didn’t want to shake his opponent’s hand. All game, that opponent, a defender from Orchard Park (N.Y.) High School, jawed with Miller and the rest of his Christian Brothers Academy teammates.

Words quickly turned to illegal, late hits. As Miller and his opponent reached each other in the postgame handshake line, the defender mouthed something inaudible under his breath. Jeffrey, Miller’s father, saw the interaction and asked for both kids to just go their separate ways.

“‘Shut your black ass up,’” Miller remembered his opponent saying to his father.

Miller lunged for the opponent before coaches and teammates held him back.

“I saw red,” Miller said. “That is the only time in my life where I lost control.”

Miller says racist incidents like the one that happened to him in high school are a “systemic problem” in lacrosse. Currently, the sport is one of the least diverse in America. As of 2018, just 18% of all Division I men’s lacrosse players are people of color and there are just two black head coaches and two black assistants of its 68 teams. Currently, non-Hispanic black people make up 13.4% of the U.S. population, per the most recent Census data. But just 2.8% of Division I men’s lacrosse players are black, per the NCAA.

While numbers have gradually increased from 2008 — during which athletes of color made up 8% of all Division I players and black players made up just 1.8% — the rate is moving at a pace that will bring little change in the sport, several current players said. Numbers are lower on the women’s side among players, and only slightly better in the coaching ranks. Athletes of color make up just 16% of all Division I players, while head coaches of color sit at 13% and assistant coaches are at 9%. The Daily Orange contacted multiple women’s lacrosse athletes and coaches of color, but did not receive any responses.

Through socioeconomic barriers and racial inequality, lacrosse has been unable to adapt, the data shows.

“It’s a game that has been taken over predominantly by white people, but it originated with the Native Americans,” said Chazz Woodson, a black professional lacrosse player and director of coaching for Nation United, an elite-level lacrosse program focused on diversifying the sport. “Lacrosse is a microcosm of America, even from its very roots.”

• • •

Drew Jenkins first realized he could become a black lacrosse player when he produced a Black History Month project on Jim Brown in the fifth grade. Jenkins already played running back for his local team and was just beginning to play lacrosse. He wanted to be like Brown, who played both. Brown was the first black lacrosse player Jenkins ever saw and immediately became his favorite.

That changed two years later, though, with Kyle Harrison’s rise to fame at Johns Hopkins University. In 2005, Harrison became the first non-white recipient of the Tewaaraton Award, given to the best player in Division I, and led JHU to a national championship. Throughout his career, Harrison had been called “the fastest” and “most athletic player,” which are phrases stereotypically assigned to black athletes, he said. With the Tewaaraton, he was “the best lacrosse player in the country.”

“That made me realize this sh*t was possible,” Jenkins said.

But Jenkins represents a very small part of the population actively looking to watch lacrosse. The sport has trouble expanding in areas where it isn’t already popular, said Eboni Preston-Laurent, the senior manager for diversity and inclusion for US Lacrosse. Very few lacrosse games are on television, Preston-Laurent said. But audiences around the country can typically only find lacrosse if they are actively searching for it. Jenkins sought out his inspiration through a fifth-grade project on Brown and repeatedly watching Harrison’s highlights on YouTube.

“Lacrosse doesn’t have that platform that the NFL has or the NBA has so they don’t get to see Paul Rabil the way they get to see Lebron James every week,” Preston-Laurent said.“… (Visibility is) not even a race or ethnicity issue. It’s a sport platform issue.”

Of late, lacrosse has generated notoriety, rather than glory, Harrison said. In 2012, Warrior Lacrosse, one of the sport’s premier equipment and apparel companies, used a slogan #NinjaPlease. In January, an announcer for the Philadelphia Wings encouraged fans to chant about scalping Native American player Lyle Thompson during a game. Last year, the Virginia Tech women’s team posted videos singing the N-word during a team bus ride.

These incidents, coinciding with the fact that lacrosse players don’t make competitive salaries compared to other professional athletes, Harrison said, have led to a culture where most young black kids don’t view lacrosse as a career option.

Athletes like Michael Jordan and Lebron James inspired kids to become like them, said Brian Dawson, Nation United’s general manager. Lacrosse has had an issue, though, any time a “non-traditional” player becomes its face, Dawson said.

The term “non-traditional” does not necessarily mean “non-white,” Woodson said. But for the most part, the “traditional” lacrosse player is white, upper-class and from regions like New England or New York, Woodson said. This means that many of these “non-traditional” players must do everything in their power to be the best influence they can be.

Woodson was once called the N-word on the field by an opponent in college, he said. As much as he wanted to retaliate, he didn’t. He knew the fact he was called a racist slur wouldn’t go viral, but that he, a black college lacrosse player, may be involved in a fight would.

“It’s making sure that I don’t do anything that allows anybody or gives anybody any room to say ‘See, this is why we don’t need players like him in the game,’ or ‘This kid can’t be given an opportunity,’” Woodson said.

• • •

Back in 2013, Syracuse assistant coach Lelan Rogers was directing a film session ahead of an upcoming game. Their opponent had a black player on the team, who Rogers referred to as “colored.” That term, Jenkins pointed out, is a Jim Crow slur. He immediately asked Rogers for an apology. Rogers “brushed it off,” Jenkins said.

Two more times during practice Jenkins asked for an apology, he said. Rogers didn’t deliver one. It wasn’t until Jenkins threatened to boycott the upcoming matchup and involve his father in the situation that Rogers finally apologized, Jenkins said.

In a statement to The Daily Orange, Rogers said: “As I said in 2013 and have said since, I made an insensitive comment. It was hurtful and I regret that I said it. I apologized to the group right away and apologized again to the entire team later.”

Following the incident at Syracuse, Jenkins’ story was published in The New York Times, but the responses weren’t what he expected. While some players told Jenkins it helped give them confidence to stand up for themselves in similar situations on their own teams, the comments section grew hateful. Statements like, “Jim Brown went through worse” filled the bottom of the page.

“If I were to have worn 22 (historically given to the best player at SU) at Syracuse I think he would’ve been gone (fired) right there when he said it,” Jenkins said. “Everyone said that I was overreacting or soft. Honestly I felt that lacrosse had turned its back on me.”

If Rogers apologized and explained that he didn’t understand the significance of what he said, “we (would) brush our hands with it and then we move on,” Miller said.

A big problem, Miller said, is that many people within lacrosse have never had someone to educate them on issues concerning inclusion and equity. White kids grow up within the game, seeing few people who don’t look like them, and they learn biases from their coaches and parents. Those kids then go onto become coaches, and that thought process becomes systematically molded into the mindsets of people in positions of power within the sport.

In the summer of 2016, Miller was coaching at a camp in Boca Raton, Florida. Since he graduated from SU in 2011, he has worn a gold necklace that his parents bought him as a graduation gift. While he was coaching, one of the players who was just 11 or 12 years old noticed the chain.

“Coach Miller,” Miller remembers the kid saying, “are you from the hood?”

“It’s not his fault,” Miller said of the young player. “But those parents, that’s their responsibility that if you do not check that sort of comment, and that thought process, he’s so impressionable, he grew up to believe that.”

• • •

Lacrosse hubs like suburban central New York and Long Island are home to some wealthy, predominantly white communities. Black people make up just 7.5% of central New York and 8.2% and 12.2% of Suffolk and Nassau Counties on Long Island, respectively. In city environments, lacrosse programs at public schools are scarce. Boston has just one program in 125 schools. Washington, D.C. had just two as of 2017. New York City has 60 programs out of more than 400 public schools in the city.

“By and large the brown and black players in college lacrosse today have followed the same path as the white players,” said Dawson, “They tend to be from more affluent neighborhoods. They tend to go to private schools.”

Growing up, Miller never had more than 10 other black students in his school at a given time. Woodson, like Harrison, grew up with a father who played collegiate lacrosse. Jenkins grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, where the median income salary is over $163,000 per year, which is $100,000 more than the median salary in the United States. If Jenkins didn’t grow up there, he likely wouldn’t have played for Syracuse, he said.

Traditionally, the top high school lacrosse programs in the country are private schools or public schools in predominantly white and affluent areas, Dawson said.

Economic barriers run deeper than simply school funding. Lacrosse currently exists on a pay-to-play model, diminishing opportunities for many in city environments.

Lacrosse is the most expensive sport to play in the U.S., with the average cost for a family running just short of $8,000. And in order to garner attention from prestigious collegiate programs, exposure is key. Thus, kids have to be attending camps and playing for elite club organizations. And these programs only have one goal in mind — to win. Oftentimes, coaches stick to their previous recruiting pipelines, Preston-Laurent said, meaning many inner-city kids with tremendous talent are never seen.

“The top-tier coaches go to the top-tier recruiting camps played by the top-tier college clubs which cost the most money,” Jenkins said.

Each year, US Lacrosse lists lacrosse camps around the country that children can attend. The lowest price for a camp was $225 in 2019, while some ranged close to $1,000. None of these prices include travel as well as outfitting players. According to ACTIVEKids, the price of the bare minimum equipment to play could reach over $800.

“As soon as lacrosse is made affordable and is available to the masses at the school level, at the club level, that’s when we’re going to start to see a drastic change,” Jenkins said. “Just buy a football and the entire block of 126th can go outside and play. You just can’t do that with lacrosse.”

• • •

Few days go by where Harrison, Woodson and Miller don’t receive messages from parents asking to encourage their kids to stick with lacrosse. But the same is true about stories of racism on the field.

Courtesy of Chazz Woodson

The numbers of players of color have improved at the collegiate and professional levels, doubling what they were back in 2008. And new opportunities arise each year at free camps and clinics run by US Lacrosse in partnership with leaders in the sport as their coaches.

Specifically, with players like Harrison, Woodson and Miller, US Lacrosse has created a cultural competency course, focused in bias, microaggressions, stereotypes, inclusive coaching, inclusive practices for leaders and social class. Currently, this course is not mandatory at the NCAA level.

Some colleges and high schools across the country have their own courses that coaches and athletes must take in order to compete, but nothing is universally required. Lacrosse programs around the country each have their own diversity instruction that their players and coaches must learn, Syracuse head coach John Desko said.

The hope for many within the game is that the US Lacrosse cultural competency course can become that.

“It comes down to education, if you’re going to be in a position of power, a position of speaking publicly, you better make sure you’re educated on what you’re speaking about,” Harrison said. “If you’re old enough to read … you should take it.”

Harrison believes though, as time continues, that racial injustice within the game will subside. Players and coaches interviewed by The Daily Orange said that most people in lacrosse think there needs to be change. Now, the sport is tasked with figuring out exactly what that change looks like, Dawson said.

Two years ago, Nathan McPeak, a current Syracuse goalie, sat around a dinner table with the rest of his Nation United teammates. One-by-one the players went around the table, sharing experiences as being the only kids of color on their respective local teams. Then, they listened to the stories from some of the white players on the team as to their experiences now being a minority on a team.

That dinner presented what lacrosse could look like, what it meant to have a diverse team in a sport often correlated with white privilege. It showcased a welcoming environment, one which promoted people’s differences and used them as strengths.

“This is our time to capitalize, our time to change the perception of our sport,” Harrison said. “Not only change the perception, but actually change it, change what this sport is about.”

• • •

Jenkins coaches middle schoolers at The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology in the Bronx. Each Wednesday, he conducts film sessions called “Watch Lacrosse Wednesdays” to teach his players about advanced schemes and tactics and give them the opportunity to ask questions.

One week, Jenkins decided to show his students a game between Loyola University and The Ohio State University. In the middle of the film session one of the players raised his hand to ask a question.

“How come all these players are white,” Jenkins remembers his sixth grader asking. “Are there ever any black players?”

At first, Jenkins chuckled, assuring his student that of course there are black players in lacrosse. There just happened not to be any on the field at that particular time.

“Well, last week when we watched a game there was only one and the week before that there were none,” Jenkins remembered the student responded. “So it seems to me like there’s no black players playing college lacrosse.”

“There was a lot of discouragement coming from his voice,” Jenkins said. “Other kids say ‘I want to shoot like Paul Rabil,’ and I say, ‘Yes! You shoot like Paul Rabil!’”

Embedded graphics by Anna Henderson | Digital Design Editor

Published on April 22, 2019 at 2:23 am

Contact Matt: mdliberm@syr.edu