The Greenfield Lacrosse Club 10U team competes against Westfield.
Submitted Photo
GREENFIELD — The sport of lacrosse has seen its popularity continue to rise year after year.
Known as typically a sport played in the Mid-Atlantic area, it has slowly spread across the country.
In Indiana, the University of Notre Dame won the NCAA Division I Men’s Lacrosse National Championship this past season, and at the high school level, the sport was nearly brought before the IHSAA to become an emerging sport.
In Hancock County, the Greenfield Lacrosse Club is seeing that growth as well.
Started in 2018 by Alonso Miller, the club has grown from one team of fifth graders, to four teams encompassing kindergarten through eighth grade.
“Most other places don’t have the depth of the program that we do,” Miller said. “We teach our kids how to start playing from a young age.”
The club has an elementary team for kindergarten through second grade, an intermediate team for third and fourth grade, a middle school team for fifth and sixth grade, and then a junior high team for seventh and eighth grade. At the elementary level, the teams play 4v4 with no goalie, and at the intermediate level, they play 7v7 across the width of the field. At the fifth-grade level and on, the teams play the full length of the field and play 10v10 like a typical lacrosse game.
The club has yet to expand into the high school level.
“If we started a high school team right away, they would have had years of losing seasons because there wasn’t lacrosse in Hancock County,” Miller said. “My solution for that was to start a feeder program. You have to learn the basics and be comfortable with a stick before you can be competent on the field.”
Miller’s goal of growing lacrosse in the county can be seen in the club’s participation and success. The four teams compete in the Indiana Youth Lacrosse Association against bigger schools such as Carmel, Zionsville and Hamilton Southeastern.
This past season, the 10U team finished the year 4-3 and were semifinalists in the Indiana Youth Lacrosse Association State Championships. The 8U team finished the year 4-2.
“We put a lot of emphasis on education and making really smart athletes. We put our kids in drills that make them think and make decisions,” Miller said. “Our mission is to build athletes first and lacrosse players second.”
With just him as a coach, Miller allows both boys and girls from the county to play on the same team despite the sport having different rules for the two.
“There’s not many volunteers and it’s just me running the club,” Miller said. “I can’t coach both boys and girls, so we have them all play together because I don’t really like to turn away any kids that are interested.”
Another way in which Miller has allowed anybody who wants to play the opportunity to do so is by making the club affordable to all. The participation fee for the club is lower than others around the state, and with the help of the Greenfield Parks, equipment is provided to the younger age groups.
“Lacrosse has always been seen as a prep school white-collar sport. That’s what we’re not. I wanted to make this club affordable, and community-run which is why we partnered with the parks. We subsidize the cost of participation so that anybody can play,” Miller said. “Unlike these other places up in Hamilton County, we aren’t charging $300, $400, $500 to play, our participation fee is around $120 or less. We want kids to play, and we don’t want to gatekeep anybody with an economic difficulty. We try to be very accommodating to the community.”
While all of that has helped contribute to the growth of the club, Miller also points to the ability of the club to stay recreational and only broadly related to the schools.
“I don’t really agree with denying a kid which is why we stayed as a rec club that is very loosely tied to the school. We don’t want to get to a point where we are governed by the school because that restricts people from outside Greenfield-Central to play,” Miller said. “If we decide next year to have a Greenfield-Central team, all those kids have to be from the school to play on the team. That’s what the IHSAA wants, and that’s why I was hesitant to make a high school team.”
Despite that, the popularity of the sport at the high school level is hard to ignore, and Miller knows between that growth and the club helping introduce athletes in the county to the sport at a young age, the creation of a high school team is likely to happen in the future.
“I think Greenfield-Central will probably have a team in the future because we’ve been doing this for quite a while now,” Miller said. “It really comes down to someone in the community wanting to start a club for them and going through the growing pains that I went through at first.”
