Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Lacrosse Equipment Gear Checklist

By Spencer Arnold



What gear or equipment do I need to play lacrosse or lax? It used to be a lot simpler to buy lacrosse equipment, but now it is actually a lot more complicated. They have lacrosse equipment for beginners, intermediate level players and advanced players. They have several brands to choose from and a large range in prices. 

So what equipment do I really need to play mens lacrosse?

Men's lacrosse gear checklist: helmet, stick, gloves, mouthpiece, arm pads, shoulder pads, ball, cup, goal, cleats, and rib pads (optional). When looking to buy quality lacrosse equipment make sure you compare durability, quality and costs. Quality gear in lacrosse is durable, lightweight, and offers you a degree of control.

The three most important type of gear needed are a helmet, a stick, and gloves. Men's helmets are composed of aluminum, titanium, or chrome. For some indoor leagues, with five player lacrosse, this is all they require. To give you a visual image, equipment or gear wise, men's lacrosse is comparable to ice hockey and women's lacrosse is comparable to field hockey.

Brine, STX, and Warrior are some of the leading manufactures of quality lacrosse products. The different types of lacrosse gear they offer gives you a wide selection of quality products to choose from. The manufacture everything you need for lacrosse sticks to gloves and protective padding.

Lacrosse is one of the oldest sports in North America, but it has evolved rapidly over the last twenty years. Just has the game has evolved, so has the need to have more protective lacrosse equipment.

Womens lacrosse equipment or gear required:

Goggles,

lightweight gloves,

sticks,

goal, ball,

goalie in full pads,

cleats.

Men and women require different types of lacrosse gear. Both of them require their own type of stick, gloves and head protection. Women wear goggles and men wear helmet equipment. Womens lacrosse sticks have shallower pockets and are smaller. Mens sticks are longer and with deeper pockets. Men's lacrosse gear has more padding and because they have more protective lacrosse equipment, their rules allow more contact.

Here is an excellent place for buying lacrosse mesh and lacrosse stringing kits Lacrosse Mesh

This is an excellent place for information on lacrosse shooting and buying lacrosse sticks Lacrosse Shooting


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Spencer_Arnold



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Tuesday, August 23, 2011

A Good Lacrosse Recruiting Video Will Help Coaches And Scouts Remember You


By Anne Harvester

Many high school students attend lacrosse recruiting camps and tournaments as part of their strategy for receiving a college scholarship. Before you attend one of these events, however, it makes a lot of sense to take your time and put together a great lacrosse recruiting video. In a sense, for an athlete, a lacrosse recruiting video is like a multi-media business card--use it to help college coaching staff and scouts remember who you are and what you can bring to their college lacrosse teams.

It does take a bit of money to participate in lacrosse recruiting camps. There are registration fees for all of them, and if you attend several the costs can mount quickly. You will want to take care that you are getting the most bang for your buck by doing all that you can to prepare for these big college lacrosse recruiting events, and one of the best activities you can work on is putting together a lacrosse recruiting video that shows you at your best.

The lacrosse recruiting video should consist of two main components, the first being you playing in a full game, and the second a collection of game highlights that show you off to your best advantage. There are several ways to get video footage of yourself suitable for college lacrosse recruiting purposes. Your high school coaches often tape your games, and use them to review plays and teach new skills. You can ask them to share some of the footage that they have shot. Another way is to have your parents or parents' friends shoot games or your play at lacrosse recruiting camps. Your parents are often in attendance at your games, and so they may be willing to tape them for you. Digital video cameras are coming down in price and can be purchased or borrowed for such activities. Software that will run on your home pc is now available that makes editing the video fairly easy to do, so you can put together a professional video. You can create a personal webpage and download the video to that, as well as dub the video to DVD.

Before attending lacrosse recruiting camps or other college lacrosse recruiting events, be sure to send an email to all coaches and scouts who are scheduled to be in attendance, and let them know you will be there. At the end of all correspondence to college lacrosse recruiting scouts, always include the link to your video, or send the DVD in the mail to them. Make clear in all correspondence with the video your complete name, jersey number and the position that you play so they can easily identify you.

You want to be ready to do your best and make a great impression when you attend college lacrosse recruiting events and lacrosse recruiting camps and tournaments, and by getting acquainted through video first, it will help scouts and coaches remember you and be looking for you.Articles Resources

Article Source: http://www.edirectory24.com/articles/

About the Author
Lacrosse recruiting camps can be a big part of a player's college plans and Anne Harvester provides a series of tips on making the process more effective.Articles Resources



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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Lacrosse Muscles Its Way West

This weekend (May 20, 2009) in Foxboro, Mass., more than 100,000 spectators are expected to pour into Gillette Stadium to see four schools -- Duke, Virginia, Cornell and Syracuse -- square off for the national championship of a sport that, if the numbers are correct, you'll be hearing a lot more about. That sport is lacrosse.

Until recently, lacrosse -- America's other stick and ball sport -- was rarely on TV and only its championship games generated much in the way of media coverage. It was mostly played on the East Coast, and it was often viewed as a game for private-school kids. Some of the game's most electrifying athletes -- Gary and Paul Gait; Casey, Ryan and Michael Powell -- were little known outside core followers. The sole exception may be Jim Brown, the former Cleveland Browns running back who played lacrosse at Syracuse University.

"Lacrosse has taken off because it combines the hitting of football, the speed of basketball, and requires the endurance of soccer," says Kyle Harrison, who led Johns Hopkins to a national championship in 2005 and who won that year's Tewaaraton Trophy as the country's best male player.

These days the sport is showing serious growth. Participation in high school lacrosse has about doubled this decade, to a total of 143,946 boys and girls playing on high school lacrosse teams in the 2007-08 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, which tracks participation by sport. In 2000-01, there were 74,225 high school lacrosse players.

And the fervor goes beyond high schools. A 2007 survey by the National Sporting Goods Association found an estimated 1.2 million Americans over age 7 had played lacrosse within the previous year -- an increase of 40% since 1999.

Johns Hopkins is one of the 56 men's Division 1 college lacrosse teams, based on NCAA data from the 2007-08 season. Including Divisions II and III, there are some 239 men's college lacrosse teams nationwide with 8,900 athletes, double the number of participants two decades ago. On the women's side, there are now more than 300 college lacrosse programs across Division I, II and III, according to the NCAA, triple the number seen two decades ago.

It's also growing when compared to other sports. In the 2007-08 school year, 17 colleges added women's lacrosse, more than any other sport. Meanwhile, a dozen men's teams were added in 2007-08, far more than sports like basketball, which added three teams; football, which added two and baseball, which added just one team.

Lacrosse is a fast-paced running and shooting game created by American Indians. Migrating south from Canada in the 19th century, it won followers in the Northeast; New York University fielded the first college team in 1877.

The men's game has 10 players who wear helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads and gloves. There's body contact and stick checking, with the most effective shooters able to weave and dodge around defensemen. The women's game has 12 players who wear protective eye goggles and sometimes gloves. There is no body contact, so the focus is on passing, cutting and running.

A number of factors have contributed to the sport's growth, including an increase in media coverage, the availability of athletic scholarships and the sport's growing appeal at schools west of the Mississippi.

The men's game has 10 players who wear Indeed, the game has steadily migrated as former players and coaches moved West. Lacrosse Magazine says that of the 2,427 men's lacrosse players on D-I rosters in 2009, 118 players came from five key Western states: California (55); Colorado (37); Washington (13); (Arizona (9) and Oregon (4.)

"The game has just exploded in the three years that I've lived in San Diego," says Dave Herman, the varsity boys' lacrosse coach at Francis Parker School in San Diego.

The availability of college scholarships is also a draw. Chuck Cohen, who helped launch a youth league in Orangetown, N.Y., that has grown from 70 boys in grades five through eight to more than 300 boys and girls from first to eighth grades, says, "Many of the D-1 teams are offering college scholarships, and there are tournaments and recruiting camps where college coaches can watch the kids play."


The Web has played a crucial role, says Steve Stenersen, CEO of US Lacrosse, the sport's governing body. "There's tons of stuff on YouTube, as well as coverage on a variety of news and alternative sites."

The media, specifically cable TV networks such as ESPN, have also popularized the sport. "It's always been considered an Eastern sport, but now it's spreading nationwide," says Steve Herbst, executive vice president of CBS College Sports Network, which has carried the sport for six years.

Lacrosse has been welcoming to women. Forty years ago, there wasn't a single girls high school lacrosse team; in the 2007-08 school year, there were over 1,600 high school programs with more than 60,000 players in 23 states. Undoubtedly, many will be watching Northwestern University, based in Evanston, Ill., compete this weekend for its fifth consecutive national women's championship.

As might be expected, the states with the most popular programs are those where the sport has traditionally been popular. New York has the most, followed by New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Maryland. But next on the list is California, with 110 high school teams and over 3,000 women's lacrosse players.

Lacrosse still trails far behind more traditional sports and it remains to be seen whether the sport will ever catch up in popularity. The number of high school lacrosse players, at about 144,000, is just a fraction of the participation seen in football, with 1.1 million high school athletes; basketball and track and field, both with just over a million players, and soccer, with 730,000, as of the 2007-08 school year.

The economy has also had an impact on the sport. Jake Steinfeld, founder of Major League Lacrosse, a professional outdoor lacrosse league that kicked off its ninth season last weekend, says the MLL now counts six teams, down from 10 in 2008. "This is like any other business, you try to understand what's happening with the country and the economy," he said. "Our goal is to stay alive and thrive."

The recession has been felt elsewhere. "We'd hoped to have 50 stores by 2019, now those plans are derailed," says Joe DeSimone, co-owner of Lacrosse Unlimited Inc., based Hauppauge, N.Y., which owns 19 stores in the Northeast. Mr. DeSimone says he generated about $250,000 from his first store in 1990; this year he expects revenue to top $15 million. "Our average sale was probably less than $50 in 1990, today it's probably $110."

Still, fans say the changes are striking. "The three areas that are really booming right now are high school women's, youth boys and youth girls," says Paul Gait, a Syracuse University Hall of Fame lacrosse player who's now president of Albany, N.Y.-based DeBeer Lacrosse, one of the four major equipment makers. But that doesn't necessarily mean business is booming: differences in how the women's and youth games are played means those players tend to spend less on equipment. "For years we were seeing revenue growth of ten percent but now it's more like 5-6% and decreasing each year," Mr. Gait said.

"People like me live by the growth of the sport and none of us are getting rich," he said.

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com and Kelly Evans at kelly.evans@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
High school girls' lacrosse teams were not officially sanctioned by state athletic associations 40 years ago. This story incorrectly stated there were no high school girls' lacrosse teams 40 years ago.




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