OPINION: HARD BOUNDARIES TAKE AWAY GAME'S ROOTS

By Al Mattei
Founder, TopOfTheCircle.com

Until 2006, all of the following lacrosse fields were legal for play under the rules of U.S. Lacrosse:

	PRINCETON (N.J.) -- Generations of Little Tigers played between the hedges right by the tennis courts. But to maintain a certain amount of width in the midfield, the arcs and fans were slightly cock-eyed when it came to the center of the field. In other words, there was much more room between the left corner of the 12-meter arcs towards the sidelines than the right.
	ALEXANDRIA THOMAS EDISON (Va.) -- The team plays its girls' lacrosse on the school's football field, which is a scant 54 yards wide. Expanding the effective playing area to 55 yards, much less 60, is not an option because of a manhole cover guarded by a stalwart orange cone near the scorers' table.
	MEDFORD LAKES SHAWNEE (N.J.) -- Under head coach Sue Murphy, the Renegades have always played a game full of width. The field was probably the widest in the country in terms of effective playing area.
	MOORESTOWN (N.J.) -- Deanna Knobloch's Quakers have also used the width of its generous pitch in order to run its attack.
	MOUNT HOLLY RANCOCAS VALLEY (N.J.) -- Before moving to a meadow at Burlington County Vocational-Technical School, the varsity played at this middle-school field across the street from the high school. The effective playing area included an extra 30 yards on the left wing at the southern end of the pitch, making the effective playing area into a weird 'L' shape.
	GETTYSBURG (Pa.) COLLEGE -- The school's campus green has served the Bullets well over the years as surrounding grassy knolls, benches, trees, and paths trace the boundary where countless players plied their trade.

But as of the 2006 season, that is no more.

One of the great time-honored traditions of the game of lacrosse was that there was no boundary, but just a playing area -- a meadow, a farm field, public roads, a forest clearing. Whenever the ball strayed from that playing area, the most tenacious pursuer of the ball, struggling through underbrush and brambles (and perhaps a snake or two), would receive the reward of possession.

That ended in the men's game sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. But the women resisted boundaries with great fervor. It allowed the game to evolve in places where you might not have had a perfectly rectangular area in which to conduct the game. Hence, the term "effective playing area," shown in the photographs with the white lines.

Women's lacrosse became as unique as baseball in this regard. While the goals were almost invariably 100 yards apart, effective playing area -- like in baseball -- can be in any shape, and with any number of quirks built in.

Baseball, for example, has an inveterate 90 foot-by-90 foot diamond. But the highest levels of the game have tolerated a 37-foot-tall left-field wall in Boston, a 490-foot power alley in left-center with three granite monuments in play in The Bronx, brick walls covered in ivy in both Los Angeles and Chicago, a 455-foot tunnel with the steps of the locker rooms in play in the Polo Grounds, three wildly different fence heights and compositions in Minneapolis, and a 90-foot-wide hill and a flagpole in Houston.

Women's lacrosse has now had its quirks, such as football goal posts, track in-run areas, and trees, written out of the game. A hard, fast, and rectangular boundary is in force. Compare the sizes of the playing areas in the pictures between the old rules (white lines) and the new rules (yellow).

"I'd like to see it be more black and white," said Northwestern head coach Kelly Amonte-Hiller. "What that rule sometimes rewards is a sloppy pass."

At times, U.S. Lacrosse has experimented with the so-called "hard" boundary during annual All-Star games in Baltimore. The rules were in place at the 2005 Women's World Cup of Lacrosse. That September, the U.S Lacrosse rules committees made their final determination.

In the early part of 2006, the rule has changed lacrosse a little bit, especially at schools which share field hockey facilities, where the area is a scant 100 by 60 yards. Teams have changed their attack a bit, taking a deep angle on the wing to make that entry pass to the first home rather than sending it in from up top and risking an overthrow or missed catch.

Undoubtedly, skills are now a must, even more than speed and shooting. Quick passes around the crease will likely be suppressed in favor of individual moves. Defenses will also use the sideline as an extra teammate, and attackers will not be able to hold the ball for long periods of time during stalls at the ends of close games. The zone defense may be under threat, since its passivity may give the opposition too much possession.

But will there be unindended consequences? Might the game be driven out of some long-time venues if school districts or universities cannot expand their physical plants to shoehorn in a standard pitch?

Indeed, what would have happened on Opening Day of the 1995 scholastic season if Princeton (N.J.) Day School and Lawrenceville (N.J.) had not agreed to a change in ground rules? Thanks to a horrendous winter of ice and snow and a late thaw, the sidelines of Princeton Day School's crowned lacrosse field were unplayable. Traffic cones were produced to narrow the pitch (shown here at left), and the game was on.

Princeton High School, for its part, moved its girls' program out of its bandbox field to the artificial grass pitch it shares with the boys' lacrosse team.

It's too bad this rule change came into place; this website would have done something completely different, something already done in at least one worldwide sport: cricket.

Before each game, a boundary is marked -- not by chalk or paint, but by a foam or plastic barrier which can be a tube or series of foam-rubber blocks anywhere from two to three inches tall. Inside of that barrier is the effective playing area.

Like in Australian Rules football or cricket, the boundary is treated differently depending on whether the ball crosses the boundary on the fly or not. If the ball is thrown out over the barrier on the fly, it is a turnover. If the ball bounces or rolls over, the player closest to that point is awarded the ball.

The barrier will also serve as the place where, once a ball rolls to or over the sideline, the referee must make a decision as to who gets the ball, rather than waiting for the pursuers to crash into a fence beyond the effective playing area.

What this minor change to the field does is allow women's lacrosse to keep its roots in Native American baggataway, and serve as a reminder as how players in the early days of the game had to earn the ball.