St. Michael-Albertville's Lacrosse Club Pleads Its Case to Become School Sanctioned Sport

 Members of St. Michael-Albertville lacrosse teams put up their best effort recently to move boys and girls lacrosse from a club sport to an official, school-sanctioned activity.

The club didn’t get the answer they were hoping for when school board members and the superintendents unanimously agreed that this could not be done for the upcoming 2011-2012 school year, but the team walked away with more information on the process, a sense of optimism from the board and a timeline for bringing the option up again this fall.

Varsity team captains Ethan Mark and Anna Churchill jumpstarted the discussion with a thorough power point presentation on the club’s participation numbers, expected growth, costs of running the team, fundraising capabilities and reasons why they would like their sport to become a school sanctioned activity.

Currently in its second year, the club has 41 girls participating in grades 9-12, and a 5-8 summer camp will be available this year for the first time. This is the boys’first year as a club sport and they have nearly 80 boys from grades 3-12 involved.

The students’ proposal was to become a state high school league member for the upcoming school year, while continuing to self-fund their sport for the next three years to give the district some time to transition.

Churchill said that just having league status, even without the monetary benefits initially, would be a huge help for the teams. For instance, she said Don’s Bus Service currently will not contract with them for transportation to and from games since they are not an official sport. She also noted that this would give their sport the ability to use school facilities for practices and games as well as to make announcements in school if there are any changes or cancellations in the practice or game schedule.

 Though board members validated these things as good points, and generally seemed optimistic about the club coming on board as a school sport at some point, they were in agreement that it was unethical for the district to call lacrosse a school sanctioned sport like the others, but not fund it as it does the other sports.

“A turnaround for next year just isn’t possible because we’ve already done our budget in January,” Superintendent Dr. Marcia Ziegler said. “It’s great that you talk about self-funding, but realistically if we’re going to have it as a high school sport, we should fund it and we should plan for it.”

 Ziegler and board member Drew Scherber also said they have looked for a sustained growth in a club sport over the course of a few years before adding it as a school sport. The most recent example of this is swimming, which took seven years to move from a club sport to school-sponsored, as well as soccer.

“I don’t believe that because swimming and soccer had to wait awhile, so you should wait also,” replied Craig Cusick, who is the boys' lacrosse organizer and founder. “I think we can show that we can support it I would hope you guys would consider us straight up. We respect your decision, but we hope you’ll give us the opportunity to keep pushing forward.”

Cusick said that while they are already experiencing significant growth, one big factor to bringing about even faster growth is to sanction it as an official sport. He cited neighboring Buffalo, whose participation numbers doubled the year lacrosse became a Minnesota state high school league sport. Mark noted that the Elk River-Rogers-Zimmerman team has so many players that Rogers is now considering seceding into their own team.

 “We know the numbers will double next year,” Cusick said, basing his assertions on what he has seen happen in other districts. “Kids absolutely love the sport. And you want to talk about opportunity? Eighty kids went out for freshman baseball this year and you only took 25. You turned away 60 kids, and that’s 60 potential players for us that we could be starting to develop. The numbers are there.”

Beyond participation numbers, the board noted that another important piece of the puzzle is also to see if the district’s upcoming levy referendum will pass in November.

“I’ll be honest with you: if [the levy] doesn’t pass, it’s going to be difficult for us to assume additional programming in that environment,” said board chair Doug Birk. “It doesn’t mean it’s an impossibility, but it’s just honest. I think we’re very committed as a board to creating activities for our student body, and this looks like a very healthy sport, but we do have a couple obstacles in front of us from a policy standpoint.”