As a part-time assistant coach at Delaware from 2001-04, Kevin Warne would spend seven hours per day in a windowless room with moody and maladjusted preteens as a middle school suspension monitor. When the bell rang at 2:30 p.m., he was as eager as the students to bust out. He’d race down I-95 and arrive at Rullo Stadium in Newark just in time to deliver punchlines as he and the players sauntered out onto the turf together.

Detroit Country Day (Mich.) and Juiced Cherries coach Chris Garland started playing lacrosse at age 15. The sport led him to Hampden-Sydney and a career inspiring others to see its transformative value. This story is from the January 2022 print edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine.

The Instagram fan page for Mike Sisselberger sounds out of this world. Many of its posts, punctuated by the hashtag “quadzilla,” read like a thinly veiled version of “Chuck Norris Facts.”

Outer space exists because it is afraid to be on the same planet as Mike Sisselberger.

Mike Siss doesn’t climb trees, he pulls them down and walks on top of them.

Blaze Riorden’s eyes grew wide long before he stared down any shots in the Premier Lacrosse League championship game. They darted around the locker room at Audi Field. At times, they focused on the yellow lacrosse ball that he held in his hands and smacked against his arms and legs. 

Riorden’s friends call this aspect of his pre-game routine “crazy eyes.” He likens it to his best impression of Gritty — the now iconic and slightly creepy Philadelphia Flyers mascot. 

Taylor Cummings’ closet tour reveals a hoard of athletic and casual footwear piled on the floor — boots, heels, flip-flops, sandals and running shoes. So many running shoes. What you won’t find in the YouTube video are the tap shoes she wore as a freshman at McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, back in 2009.

Bobby Van Buren took off. He flew into the offensive end on the Boys’ Latin School of Maryland’s lower turf field, evaded several defenders, then fired home a low-and-away lefty bounce shot on the run. He celebrated the goal for the “American” squad in the fourth quarter of the Nike Senior National All-Star Game by miming a bench press he had scripted in pregame warmups with his teammates. 

This article appears in the September/October edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine. Join our momentum and have USA Lacrosse Magazine delivered right to your mailbox.

Kyle Harrison paused after warmups at Homewood Field when he saw a familiar face near the fence bordering the turf. Standing there was Cornell Willis aka @HopkinsLaxPhan, who has attended Johns Hopkins lacrosse games at the historic venue for more than 35 years. Willis held a white sign with black block lettering.

Before this past weekend, the last two lacrosse games Jack Kelly played in ended in tears. The circumstances that prompted the emotional outpourings, however, could not have been more different.

“The last time I ever played a lacrosse game I was in tears and being carried off the field,” the Redwoods goalie said late last month in his first extended interview since playing for the U.S. national team in 2018. “The next time I played in a lacrosse game, I was walking off the field with tears of happiness after a really important and really good team win.”

Before Lars Tiffany cut down the nets, he returned to the sideline to retrieve his stick. Lined up next to the glinting composite shafts and plastic heads on the Kentucky blue grass of Rentschler Field was a six-foot solid hickory wood d-pole crafted by Onondaga stick maker Alf Jacques.  The Virginia men’s lacrosse coach plays catch with the stick in warmups. He cradles it in post-game press conferences. It was a gift from his father, Brad, a U.S. Marine and Korean War veteran who ran the family-owned steakhouse Scotch ‘N Sirloin in DeWitt, New York. 

This article appears in the May/June edition of USA Lacrosse Magazine.Join our momentum.

When you think of Hawaii, you think of gorgeous beaches, beautiful weather and surfing. You don’t necessarily think about lacrosse.

In 2003, Rudie Schaefer was determined to change that. Why couldn’t lacrosse, the fastest-growing sport on the mainland, be brought over to the nation’s only island state?