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Lacrosse in Canada

Lacrosse in Canada
Country Canada
Governing body Canadian Lacrosse Association
National team Men's national team
Women's national team
Clubs National Lacrosse League
International competitions

Lacrosse was first declared the National Game of Canada in 1859. In 1994 Parliament passed the Canada's National Sport Act which declared lacrosse to be "Canada's National Summer Sport", with hockey as the national winter sport.

Lacrosse was invented in the 1850s, when the Anglophone middle class of Montreal adopted the Aboriginal people's game of "baggataway", which was a violent game played by the First Nation teams numbering hundreds of players. The first known game between whites and Aboriginals took place in 1843.

In 1856 the Montreal lacrosse club was established; by the mid-1860s there were active teams in eastern Ontario. The National Lacrosse Association was formed in 1875; in 1880 the league became the National Amateur Lacrosse Association. By the 1880s the organized sport was found nationwide, and had become a popular spectator sport. To deal with the violence, middle class promoters spoke in Social Gospel terms about the ideal of "muscular Christianity." As working class players and spectators became more prominent, the rhetoric focused on winning at all costs.

The 1860s the Montreal Shamrocks introduced a new level of aggressiveness; it was Irish, Catholic, and fought to win. During the 1870s and 1880s the Shamrocks had bloody confrontations with the middle-class Protestant Montreal and Toronto Lacrosse Clubs. Field lacrosse was spread across Canada by Anglophone migrants from Ontario and Quebec. In February 1887, the Toronto Lacrosse Club began using hockey as a form of exercise during the winter months. By the early 1890s it was the most popular summer game in Canada; the 1900s were the golden years, as two professional leagues were set up. Escalating violence led to the collapse of the professional leagues in 1914, and the game's base of support shrank to Montreal, Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, and a few small-towns. Its failure to establish a solid base derived from a thin organizational infrastructure; for example, it was not played by schools or churches.

In 1931, big city hockey promoters introduced "box lacrosse" to turn winter hockey fans into a year-round audience. Box lacrosse was played in a smaller indoor arena space, and competitions could also be held in baseball stadiums, and again, the play was violent. Not enough cities could support teams, however, and the hard times of the Great Depression in the 1930s reduced the number of fans. Entrepreneurs, while failing to make a major commercial success, transformed Canadian amateur lacrosse, making it quite different from field lacrosse as played in the United States, Britain, and Australia. In 1987 the National Lacrosse League began; it has clubs in twelve cities in the United States and Canada.


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