The geographic growth of lacrosse is the most important ongoing development in the sport.
At the professional level, teams represent cities as far northeast as Halifax and Boston and as far southwest as San Diego. Division I lacrosse spans three time zones for men, with all four covered in the women’s game. The game is exploding at the youth level in all corners of the country, with new markets popping up constantly as lacrosse hubs.
For many, Division I NCAA lacrosse remains the peak (or close to it) of the lacrosse world. With that in mind, I began this project with a central question:
In Division I men’s lacrosse, where (literally) do goals come from?
Methodology
This project builds on work I did as a graduate student at the University of Maryland under the guidance of professor Derek Willis. For the 2023 season, we created a data scraper to compile a full list of every lacrosse player in the nation.
That data, which can be filtered and sorted, is available here.
In preparation for the 2024 season, I decided to attach geographic data to every player, including hometown, home state, home county, and high school.
Readers may notice that some athletes are missing from this list. As the list was compiled from game data, it only includes athletes who actually played in at least one contest. Whether because of the coach’s decision, redshirt, or injury, there are some players listed on team rosters that are not included in this data.
While this leaves some athletes out, it provides a clear picture of who competed during the 2023 season.
Global Game
The data shows that NCAA lacrosse has several athletes competing who hail from outside the United States. The Canadian evolution has been well documented over the last two decades and is in full swing.
In total, 184 Canadians competed during the 2023 season. They were joined in the international category by two athletes from Australia (Cornell’s Tim Graham and Rutgers’ Mitch Baker), one from England (Daniel Jones of High Point), one from Germany (Per-Anders Olters of Vermont), and one from Ireland (Cathal Roberts of Princeton).
At least four players list their hometowns in Indigenous communities. It should be noted that our figure for Indigenous players is likely an under-estimate, and that other Indigenous players had hometowns listed that made it challenging to differentiate from Canadian or American players.
Sea to Sea
Digging into the country level data, both Canada and the US have seen growth in the number of states and provinces represented in Division I.
In total, 43 US states were represented in Division I. The most players came from predictable states, led in order by New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. It is worth noting the emergence of states like California (seventh most players), North Carolina (tenth most players), Texas (11th), Georgia (13th), and Florida (15th).
These non-traditional states are no longer anomalies at the highest level and they are elevating quickly to the status of legitimate lacrosse factories. The highest states continue to produce top level talent on volume, but it seems likely that this list will continue to even out a decade from now.
In Canada, five provinces are represented. Though not the first Manitoban to play Division I lacrosse (shoutout Luke Magnan among others), Maryland’s Cayden Onagi is the lone “Friendly Manitoban” in the division. Meanwhile, Zachary Miller (Queens NC) and Alexis Simard (Canisus) represent Québec.
In total, Ontario leads the way with 127 players across the country, followed by British Columbia with 39 and Alberta with 15… more on the Albertans later.
This map shows how many players from each state and province competed during the 2023 season. The colors on the map indicate the number of players, but the combined goals, assists, and points scored by each state can be viewed by hovering over the desired state. Readers can also use the zoom feature to view certain areas.
Goals Come From the… Prairies?
We will have lots more to come on this data, but to begin, I looked at the highest number of goals, assists, and points by state on a per player basis. In other words, I found the cumulative goals scored by players from each state, and divided it by the number of players from that state.
The winner of this fictitious and admittedly random award is? Alberta.
Yes, the boys from the prairies pumped out an impressive 150 goals amongst the 15 of them. They were led by Bellarmine’s Kyle Playstead and St. Joseph’s Levi Anderson who chipped in 40 and 39 goals respectively. Most of the rest of the damage was committed by members of the Queens University squad, which includes six of the 15 Albertans.
Following Alberta in the top five is Kansas. Devon Cowa of Marquette chipped in 26 goals for the Marquette Golden Eagles last year, and was joined by fellow Kansan Griffin Fries who added four more. When you add in Will Gormser of VMI who added five of his own, Kansas had 35 goals from just four players.
Next on the list was British Columbia, and in the four spot was Oregon. Oregon is one of the most interesting states on the list. While the group includes a relatively small 25 players, they contributed 192 goals and 93 assists. Two Oregonians were named to the first team USILA All-American (Tucker Dordevic and Sam Handley), one more on the second team (Ajax Zapitello), and one more was an honorable mention (Ross Scott). That is incredible production from a relatively small cohort.
The following chart was also included in my article on Canadians in the NCAA, and it shows the scoring metrics of each state on a per-player basis.
Stay tuned to lacrosse culture daily for lots more analysis on this data, including a look at county by county statistics that help to answer the question of where lacrosse players actually come from.