Let’s get rowdy for women’s lacrosse.
Let’s provide a legit home field advantage for NU’s most successful squad. Let’s actually go to our beautiful lacrosse field on the side of Lake Michigan to see Northwestern’s five-time champions beat up other really good teams. Let’s treat it like football. Let’s tailgate. Let’s wear pinnies and drink casually out of brown paper bags and solo cups on the lakefill beforehand and enjoy the beauty of plausible deniability. Let’s enjoy the weather. Let’s actually cheer on women’s lax.
My newfound enthusiasm comes from my first ever women’s lacrosse game last Sunday. I was just like you: despite living literally steps from Lakeside Field (and the fact that my room facing the Patten parking lot generally ensures the women’s lax team wakes me up before every one of their home games because they choose to yell for eight minutes straight while blowing a vuvuzela an hour before games on their way over to the field), I’d never decided to care about our dominant lacrosse team. Like many NU students, I make it out to every football game and like, uh, some NU students I go to most basketball games. But lax? Never played it, never watched it, and, of course, there’s the blatant tinge of sexism that makes your average guy feel any women’s sporting events has to be unworthy of male attendance. Instead of walking three minutes to the stadium, I generally chose to sleep in and/or play NBA Street Vol. 2.
So Sunday afternoon’s trip to Lakeside Field was my first. NU was playing No. 8 Penn, and I knew literally nothing about the sport. (I still don’t.) The weather was beautiful – I tanned- and the game was exciting without any knowledge of the sport. The stands were packed, with more than 1,100 people in attendance. But looking around, I could tell not many were my classmates. We had parents, young lacrosse-playing girls (who all bring sticks, although as far as I can tell, coach Kelly Amonte Hiller doesn’t have a habit of calling up 12-year-olds during the game), alumni and a smattering of NU athletes cheering on their fellow Wildcats. But we didn’t have your run-of-the-mill NU kid. I didn’t see many Greek letters or any of the million free shirts given to the student section at NU football games. I found myself surrounded not by kids I’ve ever seen in my life before, but by some obnoxious Penn lax parents repeatedly spelling “Penn”.
Although we all acknowledge the lacrosse team exists, it doesn’t get the positive play among our student body it should. A bunch of Nebraska bros came to visit my fraternity last weekend, and one of us said to them something along the lines of “our sports teams are so bad, the only sport we’re actually good at is women’s lacrosse.” Instead of taking pride in the fact that our team is very, very good, the success of the women’s lacrosse team indicated NU’s tradition of suckitude, which, if you’ve noticed, doesn’t always exist. It came out like women’s lacrosse is inherently inferior, and that our sports suck so much we can only manage to be good at, well, worse sports.
So let’s ditch our indifference to a really good team. Let’s cast aside our weird stigma that we shouldn’t pay attention to NU players playing really well, just because we’re scared to pay attention to the sport they play. And let’s seriously drink on the Lakefill. Not joking there.
