Somewhere on I-64, leading away from Hampton University’s waterfront campus in southeast Virginia, sits a billboard. This icon, this display comprised of highly engineered vinyl and metal features the visage of five lacrosse players. As the Pirates’ season comes to a close, the sign is perhaps the last standing testament to the outside world of all that the team has accomplished this season. In the span of less than a year, Hampton’s men’s lacrosse program, under head coach Lloyd Carter, have gone from intramural club to the first team from a historically black college or university to play in the top flight of American collegiate sports.
On 13 February when the Hampton Pirates took on Roberts Wesleyan College, ESPN marked the historic occasion by airing its two-hour SportsCenter live from Hampton’s campus with features on the team peppered throughout the show. The coverage included features on Michael Crawford, the student who dreamed of bringing the sport to Hampton University before his untimely death. ESPN’s Chris Connelly interviewed Jim Brown, the NFL legend who remains the only athlete enshrined as a Hall of Famer for both pro football and lacrosse. Hampton coach Lloyd Carter was interviewed live on the field at Armstrong Stadium, the area behind him packed with the Hampton student body and community members from the surrounding area, who braved the frigid cold temperatures to be a part of history.
The Pirates lost, 20-3, but the significance of the day resonated with people long after the scoreboard went dark.
According to the NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report released in the fall of 2015, lacrosse is America’s the fastest-growing college sport. It originated among Native Americans but the current players of the sport are predominantly white. According to the most recent NCAA study, just 1.9% of Division I men’s lacrosse players identify as black.
A number of organizations like the US Lacrosse Foundation are working to bring the game to more young athletes, and it appears there is an ongoing conversation about how to make this game accessible and appealing to a larger audience, particularly an audience of color. The importance of the first Division I team from an HBCU to this movement cannot be overstated.
The idea of this team was the handiwork of a Hampton student that didn’t live long enough to the sport he loved come to the campus that he loved just as much.
Michael Crawford, a senior at Hampton University, started playing lacrosse in middle school. He thought that adding lacrosse enhanced the university’s goal of making Hampton a more diverse place that was able to draw the brightest students, academically as well as athletically, while cementing its place in history as a national and international university. In the fall he mentioned the idea to his mother. Then shortly after Christmas in 2010, he went into cardiac arrest at the family’s Brooklyn home and died suddenly due to an undiagnosed enlarged heart. When Michael didn’t come downstairs for dinner, Verina Mathis-Crawford found her son unresponsive in his bedroom. He was 21, one semester away from graduating with his degree in sports management.
While reading through old emails, Mrs Crawford stumbled upon a proposal Michael sent about introducing the sport of lacrosse to his school. A month after her son’s death, she ran a Google search for three words: “black”, “lacrosse” and “coach”. Her search led her to Lloyd Carter who, at the time, was the chief of emergency medical services for the Baltimore City Fire Department.
Carter comes from a long line of lacrosse players from West Baltimore, many of whom went on to play for nearby Morgan State in the 1970s. He was introduced to the sport of lacrosse at 7: “In my area of West Baltimore called Edmondson Village, which was predominantly an African-American neighborhood. In our four-block radius we all played lacrosse. They call it ‘The Creator’s Game’ because it has a very spiritual feeling to it when you play it. That’s what really drew me to it. It allows you to bring out the best in all of your athletic abilities.”
Carter got his first coaching job from a Morgan State teammate and led Baltimore’s Northwestern High from 1999 to 2013. Carter, 57, and also helped co-found Morgan State’s club program in 2004. He was also instrumental in a non-profit organization in Baltimore called Blax Lax that focused on introducing the game to young black lacrosse players and creating opportunities for them to hone their skills and compete at an elite level.
At Hampton, Carter collaborated with Verina Mathis-Crawford and they helped build the program from the ground up. The first stop was an intramural team, which was founded in 2011. He dedicated his weekends to coming to campus to coach the budding team. On days when the traffic was favorable, it took three hours in each direction from Baltimore to the Virginia campus. On bad days it was four.
Hampton’s entrance into the NCAA’s top flight makes it the 70th Division I men’s lacrosse team. The team played six games in its inaugural season, a modified schedule as it plays as an independent. Hampton’s other sports teams compete in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC), but none of the other schools have competitive lacrosse teams, leaving the Pirates without conference affiliation.
Part of lacrosse’s stunted diversity growth is due to membership requirements. The game has shifted from a high school-based sport to being club-centric, which comes with a significant price tag. The cost of equipment – specifically in the men’s sport, which uses pads, gloves and helmets It can cost more than $300 to fully outfit a youth player, and that doesn’t include shorts, sweats, t-shirts, a mouthpiece, a ball, cleats and socks. The financial barrier to play can be overwhelming. Then add in the yearly expense of club lacrosse, travel teams, camps and showcase events – not to mention the cost of private instruction. The dream of playing lacrosse at a competitive level can costs a family hundreds of dollars a year, if not thousands.
Even the college intramural level the sport costs more than casual observer would understand. According to Morgan State’s GoFundMe page, established to raise money for equipment and upkeep, it costs $150 per official for a game, and each game needs three officials. Then there are league fees and tournament costs on top of outfitting each player. If the team chooses to participate in an away game, there’s the cost of providing buses, lodging and food. The coaching staff for Morgan State’s club team is comprised of volunteers.
Hampton’s ascension to Division I paves the way for other lacrosse players of color to make their way onto the collegiate stage. Many of the student-athletes on Hampton’s current varsity team had no plans of playing the sport in college, let alone at this level. Ales Sales and Jeremy Triplett, two of the team’s captains, never played lacrosse before coming to the university. The result of (current recruiting) efforts put together an academically inclined group of students who also happened to be athletic. Darrell Kidd Jr, a senior, and co-captain mentions that his “first reason to for coming to Hampton was its music program. I play drums and the piano and I was also interested in the journalism school.” Freshman Julian Edwards came for the the small class sizes, individual attention and the science program. Both Kidd and Edwards learned to play lacrosse before they arrived at Hampton.
Darrell was raised in upstate New York and played football, baseball and basketball. “My junior year I found myself not playing baseball and my football teammates decided to all go out and play lacrosse. I didn’t know much about it and my best friend ended up putting a stick in my hand and said: ‘Just try it.’ I started researching it and practicing at it I started to like it.”
Julian was introduced in a different way: “My mom actually showed me the sport of lacrosse through after school football – after practice we saw them playing and she wanted to know if I wanted to try it.”
When lacrosse came to Hampton as a club sport, the leadership applied for grants so that they could purchase equipment, reached out other schools to schedule matches and lobbied school officials for a designated practice space. US Lacrosse organization assisted the campaign by awarding the Hampton club a First Stick Program equipment grant in 2011. The group went on to support the HBCU Lacrosse All-Star Classic in subsequent years. It was that HBCU tournament that caught the attention of Edward, a current freshman, and convinced him to commit to Hampton: “I came to look at the lacrosse club team around this time last year during the HBCU tournament and I saw a lot of us. After the tournament in April I really looked forward to coming here, I knew these were going to be my first friends. I knew if I needed anything – lacrosse-wise or school-wise they would be there to help me out. We want to see each other succeed. I look forward to seeing them everyday, and to getting better – as a person, and as a player.”
The team hopes they will soon have their own locker room after spending their first season borrowing space from the football team to review film. The Pirates recently received confirmation from athletic director Eugene Marshall and university president Dr William Harvey of more funding. The players and coach maintain that they’re well supported by the administration. Darrell Kidd echoes that sentiment: “We always had the university behind us. They always made sure we were outfitted in the right gear and we had the school pushing us forward. Once we became Division I program and the historic value came to our team, everybody on campus wanted to be a part and our first game was the biggest crowd I’ve ever seen at a lacrosse game, period.”
Cloaked in Under Armour gear provided to the team at a discount, and practicing under the lights on Hampton’s new turf field, the men have come further than naysayers expected them to. The Pirates won’t radically transform the underpinnings of the sport in a year, but they give other African-American youth carrying a stick and ball a dream and a purpose. A HBCU Lacrosse Facebook page seeks to chronicle the rise of the sport.
Edwards and Kidd no longer just see themselves as student-athletes, but as role models in the community around Hampton as well as their hometowns, something Edwards started to understand in high school. “In our community around my high school the area was really diverse, but I was the only [lacrosse player of color] around. I wanted them to see me play. I wanted to bring my [lacrosse] stick around that community.”
The team understands there will be growing pains, which the results often reflected. The team followed up their historic opener with losses to Thiel (by a score of 21-5), Wagner (18-4), Ohio Valley (16-4) and VMI (25-4). Julian mentioned that he had to learn patience this year, and Darrell had to develop his leadership style.
Still, though, the Pirates walked away from their historic first season encouraged and emboldened. Darrell puts the team’s efforts into perspective: “We had a lot of high expectations – not just from us but from the school and the community. Everybody expected wins and a great season but we had to look realistically at the season and we knew this wasn’t going to be an easy transition into the NCAA from the club level. None of us accept losing. It stings a lot to every player but we’re taking steps to make sure everything is a learning experience. When we watch film we look not just for everything we’ve done wrong, but everything that we’ve done right. We continue to do the right things and we work hard to correct the wrong things.”
Coach Carter has them working on the fundamentals – being able to catch and throw, and being able to play relaxed. “I’m looking for improvement at stages and in individuals. I’ve had the blessings and opportunities to be on teams that were undefeated and won championships and I’ve been on teams that never won a game. I know both ends of the spectrum and normally what transpires to get from one extreme to the other is talent and experience. At this point we are trying to build both.”
The billboard along the Interstate is a start, a visible manifestation of the things the men hope will continue to evolve and thrive even when their time with the team has passed. People driving along I-64 see the sign and occasionally write emails to the team, or Facebook messages to the players, asking for advice or at times simply thanking them for being a role models, breaking barriers and making history.
