Pundits have employed many devices to sum up America's cultural divisions. During the 1980s, they talked about the "culture war" -- the battle over textbooks, abortion, prayer in school, affirmative action, and funding of the arts. This war pitted conservative defenders of tradition and morality against liberal defenders of modernity and pluralism. More recently this debate has been described as the split between "red and blue America" -- the two colors used to distinguish partisan preference in maps charting presidential election voting. But another explanatory device has yet to penetrate political science departments and the national desks of newspapers. There is exists an important cleavage between the parts of the country that have adopted soccer as its pastime and the places that haven't. And this distinction lays bare an underrated source of American cultural cleavage: globalization.As a huge soccer fan and a huge lacrosse fan who has spent almost his entire life in blue states, I do not carry the cultural barriers that prevent people from embracing an unfamiliar sport. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between soccer and lacrosse.
Soccer is, for a lack of a better term, a "foreign" sport. It was born and raised abroad. Its emigration to the United States came after it was the world's most popular sport. Its most-accomplished stars all speak with accents from faraway lands. Many of its customs, such as diving or feigning injury, are beneath contempt in our culture. Soccer is, in this country, largely a strange and an effete importation.
Lacrosse, however, could not be more American. We inherited the game from the original inhabitants of this land and developed it on these shores. Much like football, lacrosse has developed with different variations in Canada and the United States but the development is North American, not global. We are exporting the game as we did with basketball, a game invented by a Canadian and that reached maturity here before exportation. Lacrosse players wear helmets like football players, carry sticks like hockey players, use the footwork of basketball players, and have the eye-hand coordination of baseball players. Although the game has its odd rules and customs, lacrosse does not seem foreign to a casual American observer. The voices of the high priests of the sport, be they from Maryland, New York, Canada or wherever else, cannot be mistaken for those from the heartland, but also are clearly from this continent. Immigrants are not better at lacrosse than the natives unless you happen to be an immigrant from a place like Long Island. Lacrosse is a quintessentially American game
This is not to say that we should expect schools in the Big XII and SEC to pick up lacrosse anytime soon. Many schools are facing Title IX burdens and picking up limited revenue sports is not a priority for most institutions. A lack of desire for sports that will be a drain on an athletic department's coffers is doubtless a prominent reason. But we should not expect that lacrosse will face all of the same obstacles that soccer has in this country.
That said, lacrosse should look to follow the growth model of soccer for inclusion in Division I schools. We do not need major football powers to embrace lacrosse in order for the sport to be legitimate. We simply need more Division I schools to be fully funded programs. Whether those schools play football as well is immaterial to lacrosse's growth. Any school that plays Division I soccer is likely to have facilities suitable for lacrosse. Thus the sport will grow as opportunities arise for people to play it at a high level regardless of whether those opportunities occur at sports that also play big-time football.
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