Lacrosse Contact Team Sport

Lacrosse is a contact team sport played between two teams using a small rubber ball and a long-handled stick called a crosse or lacrosse stick. It is often considered as a rough sport, although injuries are less frequent than in American football and other contact sports. The head of the lacrosse stick is strung with loose mesh designed to catch and hold the lacrosse ball. Offensively, the objective of the game is to score by shooting the ball into an opponent's goal, using the lacrosse stick to catch, cradle, and pass the ball to do so In field lacrosse, attackmen are solely offensive players (except on the "ride", when the opposition tries to bring the ball upfield and attackmen must stop them), defensemen or defenders are solely defensive

Lacrosse has roots in the cultural tradition of the Native American Iroquois people, inhabiting what is now New York, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the Northeastern US. It may have been developed as early as 1100 AD among indigenous peoples on the continent. The game has undergone many modifications since that time. In the traditional aboriginal Canadian version, each team consisted of about 100 to 1,000 men on a field that stretched from about 500 meters to 3 kilometers long. These games lasted from sunup to sundown for two to three days straight. These games were played as part of ceremonial ritual, a kind of symbolic warfare, to give thanks to the Creator or Master. James Smith described in some detail a game being played in 1757 by his fellow tribe members "wherein now they used a wooden ball, about three inches diameter, and the instrument they moved it with was a strong staff about five feet long, with a hoop net on the end of it, large enough to contain the ball." The Italian explorer Count Paolo Andreani documented his contacts with the Oneida peoplein the 1790s and his reports on the Oneida include an illustration which is thought to be the first recorded picture of a lacrosse stick. Lacrosse was contested for medals in the 1904 and 1908 Olympics with teams from Canada, the United States, and Great

On each occasion, a playoff was held in the United States to determine what team would go to the Olympics; each time the playoffs were won by the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays of the university in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1855, William George Beers, a Canadian dentist, founded the Montreal Lacrosse Club. In 1867, Beers codified the game, shortening the length of each game and reducing the number of players to 12 per team. The first game played under Beers' rules was at Upper Canada College in 1867; they lost to the Toronto Cricket Club by a score of 3–1. By the 20th century, teams in high schools, colleges, and universities in Canada and the United States began playing the game. According to a report of a survey conducted by US Lacrosse in 2013, Field Lacrosse is one of the fastest growing sports and the fastest growing team sport in NFHS. In 1998, a number of national lacrosse organizations in the United States merged to create US Lacrosse, a unified national governing body for men's and women's lacrosse in the United States. Headquartered in Baltimore, US Lacrosse seeks to provide a leadership role in virtually every aspect of the game. On July 4, 2008, Major League Lacrosse set the professional lacrosse attendance record: 20,116 fans attended a game at Invesco Field in Denver, Colorado. In the summer of 2001, a men's professional field lacrosse league, known as Major League Lacrosse (MLL), was inaugurated