Paul Rabil had a dream that went beyond the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL) that he founded with his brother, Mike Rabil, four years ago.
His passion was to bring the Native American sport to new heights with an eye toward getting it back in the Olympics for the first time in more than seven decades.
“It was a part of our early pitch materials — that on the horizon, it was possible that lacrosse could be in the Olympic Games,” Paul Rabil said. “It’s something that leadership in the sport has been working on for the greater part of the last two decades.”
Photo: AP
On Saturday, the eight-team PLL began its fourth tour-based season before a near-sellout crowd at an 8,500-seat venue in Albany, New York, the first stop on a 47-game slate in 13 cities across the US.
The league has a new four-year contract with ESPN that expands lacrosse’s global reach to more than 170 countries.
ESPN is to carry 246 games as part of the first multi-year, multi-event media partnership for World Lacrosse, which in July last year achieved a milestone when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) granted the federation full recognition.
Over the past two decades, lacrosse has been the fastest-growing college sport. There are more than 900 teams in the three divisions — more than half of them women — and more than 28,000 athletes participating, the NCAA said.
Just as important, perhaps, has been the growth of the game in southern California. USA Lacrosse has five Urban Lacrosse Alliance teams to reach youths in the region, and there are more than 15,000 high-school players, split just about evenly between boys and girls.
Developed centuries ago by the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, lacrosse is the national game of Canada and the oldest team sport in North America, its roots in upstate New York and across the Canadian border.
It has twice been a medal sport in the Summer Olympics — in 1904 in St Louis, Missouri, where an Iroquois team of Mohawk Indians from Canada took bronze, and four years later in London. It last appeared in the 1948 Games, also in London, as a demonstration sport.
If it is selected, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which is to compete in Alabama and at the Women’s World Championship in Maryland at the end of this month, could be allowed to field men’s and women’s teams.
That would pave the way for one of the game’s greatest players — PLL star Lyle Thompson of the Onondaga Nation, which is outside Syracuse, New York — to be able to compete.
“The players want the sport in the Olympics,” Mike Rabil said on Saturday. “The guys are bought in. We’re bought in. It’s a big deal for us.”
Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai, an investor when the PLL was formed, said World Lacrosse will talk with the IOC about making an exception for the Haudenosaunee to be included if lacrosse is selected.
“We’re all very supportive of this. The Native Americans invented the sport. It’s the legacy,” said Tsai, who was born in Taiwan and played college lacrosse at Yale University. “If you look at being inclusive and having diversity and you’re going to exclude a group of people who invented the sport — and they would add much more diversity to the sport — it just flies in the face of the values of the LA Olympics.”
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