When I was six years old, my uncle gave me a lacrosse stick for my birthday. Every day after school, I would grab it from the bench in our kitchen and run outside to play catch against this thing called a Rebounder, a bouncy net that sends the ball straight back to you. The challenge was to see how many throws I could make without dropping the ball. Some days I could barely get to five, and on the best days I got close to 50.
One day my dad saw a newspaper ad for a youth lacrosse league, the very first one in Minnesota. The ad said it was for seventh and eighth graders, but I begged my dad so relentlessly that he eventually agreed to take me to check it out. But no promises, he said.
The league organizer was this big guy named Mark who had a goatee, glasses and a booming laugh. I'm pretty sure my dad struck a deal with him to make sure the older kids would go easy on me. It was no matter to me though I was too young and excited to feel patronized. My world shifted that day, and the solitary games in the backyard took on a new sense of urgency and heroics, animated by imaginary teammates, opponents and last-second goals.
There were only enough kids for two teams, so the two teams red and blue played each other every Saturday. We played on an AstroTurf carpet in a hockey rink and wore hockey pads and hockey helmets. If you could run for more than five steps without dropping the ball, you were considered a good player. We were utterly oblivious to the fact that in other parts of the country, this was an actual sport with actual rules, equipment and referees. A couple of dads volunteered to coach but bless their hearts they had no idea what was going on either. Mark, the one guy in the building who had actually seen the sport played before, stood contentedly in the middle of the field, blowing the whistle whenever one of us somehow managed to throw the ball into the goal.
One Saturday, without warning, the powers that be granted my six-year-old self my greatest wish to score a goal. I was standing behind the net, and the ball appeared right in front of my sneakers, as if it were asking me to scoop it up. I did, and when I looked up, there was a clear lane to the net. Suddenly, I was in front of the goalie, and before I could think, I shot the ball low, aiming between the goalie's legs. With one burst of instinctual courage, I did the thing I had been daydreaming about for months. My teammates ran over to give me high-fives. One of the big guys scooped me up and put me on his shoulders as if I had just won some kind of championship, ignoring the fact that the game was almost over and we were down by six.
We all have those triumphant moments we return to in our minds again and again. I return to this one to make sense of my life in lacrosse and why, after 15 years, I still go out and play every day. There's been a lot of disappointment and uncertainty in my lacrosse career at Dartmouth. We've lost two-thirds of the games we've played. In those really down times, when nothing seems to be working, you can sense the whole team wondering what all this is for. After another difficult season last year, I wondered aloud to my mom that maybe I should've decided to do something else in college, to which she laughed and replied, "Kip, you couldn't not play lacrosse if you tried."
When I return to the memory of my first goal, I remember that it had nothing to do with winning, accomplishment or any of those external factors that all too often weigh athletes down rather than serve as motivation. I felt utterly in control, but also somehow not, as if what had just happened wasn't really me but some other force that made my stick fling the ball at the net in that way, at that angle, at that very second. I had submitted myself to a scary, uncontrollable moment and came out the other side not only unscathed, but victorious.
Last Saturday in Washington, D.C., we played a back-and-forth game with Georgetown University in front of a big crowd. We took more chances than I've ever seen a Dartmouth team take before. Some didn't work out, but the ones that did were absolute magic. Afterwards, we stood on the field talking excitedly with parents and alums, relishing in that reckless energy that pours out when you let it, a feeling I'll forever associate with AstroTurf and hockey pads.
