Maplewood Lacrosse Club Looking to Keep Growing

One of the oldest organizations in town, the Maplewood Lacrosse Club, has been a part of the Maplewood community since 1957 and has become part of the identity of Maplewood — and South Orange.

Maplewood Lacrosse was one of the original lacrosse clubs in the state, built to help popularize the sport in the area — a sport that is now considered one of the fastest growing in the state and country.

In the beginning, the club, which fielded its first team in the 1959 season, used to travel all over the east coast to play games against teams from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware. They were called the Big Green as an ode to the Green Bay Packers, who were the dominant team in football at the time. Since then, with the rise of more clubs within the surrounding counties, the Maplewood club now plays most of its games in Essex County.

Perhaps the best and most admirable thing about the Maplewood Lacrosse Club, which won five state championships following the 1959 season, is that it was and still is completely volunteer based. Fathers double as coaches, mothers and other friends as transportation help. Food and transportation are donated by the communities of Maplewood and South Orange.

"The Maplewood Lacrosse Club is independent of the rec league. It's all volunteer," said former club coach Mike Whelan. "There's no transportation provided. The lacrosse community is a tight knit group and we rely on a lot of people."

Some of the other services provided by the club include erecting shooting cages around town in various parks to help spread and promote the game to children from families who can't afford to pay.

Since the beginning, the club's number one mission has been to serve as a feeder program to Columbia High School, which at one time was one of the preeminent public school lacrosse teams in the state. In recent years, the level of play at Columbia has declined, and there are a number of reasons for that.

First is the popularization and glamorization of baseball, football and basketball. There aren't many lacrosse players on television, and almost no one can name a professional or a high level college lacrosse player. It's hard for lacrosse to compete with the attention that other sports get.

While only baseball among those is a spring sport, all three drain players away from lacrosse as kids hoping to get scholarships are specializing more and more often, meaning that they are only playing and training for one sport all year long. So a football player hits the weight room and works on speed training through the winter and the spring to have an edge on the competition in summer practices.

Another factor in the decline is the rise of private schools. Picture being one of the best players on your seventh or eighth grade team. You want to play in college, your high school team has been struggling for most of your life and then Seton Hall Prep (or another one of the many private schools in the area) comes to you and your parents and offers you a scholarship to play for their team.

It's an opportunity that is hard to pass up, and a problem that the Maplewood Lacrosse Club and other clubs throughout the state have had to deal with more and more. It's the reason why almost every team at SHP is filled with DI athletes and almost never have bad seasons.

But perhaps the biggest problem is numbers.

The club fields about 150 kids per spring and while they would love to expand past the six-to-eight teams they normally field, they need more space to do so. As far as field space and playing time, they are currently tapped out and filled to capacity, using Ritzer Field next to CHS.

"If you open your talent pool up, it's going to be a lot easier to get talent," said club president Steve Ramos. "Our numbers are artificially tailored because we don't have space."

So while the South Orange/Maplewood Baseball Committee can choose from a field of over 1,200 kids each year, the talent pool for the lacrosse club is much smaller. Many of the best athletes in the two towns are not playing lacrosse.

"Some of the districts who have elite level talent get two to three times the turnout that we do," Whelan said.

Some suggestions for generating more space included making Dehart Field a turf field to open up field time and decrease the amount of wear and tear. Another was getting some assistance from their South Orange neighbors, something that Ramos said has not always been easy to come by, mainly because of the name of the club.

Of course things could start to change with just one or two good seasons at the high school level. As the saying goes: winning breeds winning. Just as interest in the football team has risen over the past two seasons of newfound success, the same would likely happen if the lacrosse team could put together a few winning seasons and deep runs into the postseason.

"This is one of the toughest conferences in the state," Ramos said. "If you look around the area, there are a lot of really good teams."

Both Ramos and Whelan said that the next few incoming classes should make positive impacts on the high school program.

"I think what you will see in the next few years is that the kids who are playing at the club level will enter the high school ranks. I think you will see the club improve and the record improve," Whelan said.

For more information about the Maplewood Lacrosse Club, contact club president, Steve Ramos at 973-763-7989. If you can't wait for the spring season, locals can participate in the Fall Ball Lacrosse League at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison. The flier is attached; contact Pat Scarpello at 201-452-7683.
or email pscarp@fdu.edu.