October 2005
Net Gains
Munich teams are leading the way in one of the world's fastest-growing sports
Lacrosse likes to bill itself as “the fastest game on two feet.” Though Irish hurlers take issue with this, with ball speeds reaching up to 93 miles an hour, both are indisputably fast. Not that Ted Wiederhold, president of the Munich Lacrosse Club wants to buy into that discussion. “You’d have to be incredibly tough or certifiably crazy to play hurling, so I’m not gonna argue with them,” says the 29-year-old Texan.
In both sports, players use a stick to pass the ball around the field. The main difference between the two lies in equipment. While hurlers take to the field with little more than a sweater, shorts and a prayer, lacrosse players are protected by helmets, shoulder pads and thick gloves—all of which is great comfort when your opponent is trying to beat you around the head with his stick, as can happen in both games. Yet, while lacrosse may seem the more retiring of the two, it actually stems from a highly aggressive creed. Rooted in Native American culture, the sport (known as “The Creator’s Game”) was played as a substitute for war with as many as 1,000 players on each side and fields ranging from 500 yards to over a mile in length. One French explorer who witnessed the game commented, “Almost everything short of murder seems allowed.”
Adopted by the French and refined by the Canadians and Americans, modern lacrosse is an action-packed game that involves great skill, foot and hand speed, stamina and physical body contact. “It is a great game and incredibly beautiful to watch,” says Wiederhold of his attraction to the sport. “It’s like a mixture of the best parts from basketball, soccer and ice hockey.”
Played by two teams of ten players, lacrosse derives a lot of the defensive and offensive set-ups from basketball, but the speed of play is like hockey or soccer. There are virtually no whistle stops and the pace of the game is intense. Players scoop the ball off the ground and throw it through the air to other players. They are also allowed to carry the ball with the stick and to check and hit one another with their bodies and sticks. The aim is to shoot the ball into a six-foot by six-foot goal, which is defended by a goalkeeper. While physical and robust, the sport causes relatively few injuries on account of the protective padding worn by the players. The most common tend to be rolled ankles or other leg injuries similar to any other running sport. “You do tend to come out of a hard game bruised, but I have hardly ever seen a serious injury,” Wiederhold says. “Statistically, the sport is supposed to have a lower injury rate than women’s beach volleyball.”
After having played lacrosse in high school in San Antonio, and at college in Boston, Wiederhold was resigned to the fact that he was unlikely to play it again when he moved to Munich in 1999. An employee of Amazon.de, the online book store, he lived in the Bavarian capital for two years oblivious to the fact that the city was home to one of Germany’s powerhouse teams.
“I saw a guy on the U-Bahn with a stick one day. I was completely surprised. I ran him down and asked what was going on. I’ve been involved with the club ever since.”
One of the fastest-growing team sports in the world, lacrosse arrived in Germany in 1992, when Jörg Rohaus, a Munich university student, returned to the country from an exchange program in the US. Infatuated by the game, he brought back a bag full of sticks and gathered his friends together. A similar event occurred almost simultaneously in Berlin and the first German lacrosse league was created the following year.
Today, there are 27 teams playing in four leagues throughout Germany, in addition to two women’s leagues with 10 teams. Most of the teams are based in northern Germany, but, along with Munich, southern teams include Passau and Stuttgart. The Munich women’s team, which has won three German championships in the last five years, was the runner up this year after a heart-breaking loss in overtime to their archrivals, Berlin.
Wiederhold says the Munich club regularly attracts between 25 and 30 players to the training sessions at the HC Wacker Hockey Club grounds near Brudermühlstrasse on Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. While usually thought of as a North American game, the club has only two foreigners at the moment: Wiederhold and a Canadian. The rest of the players are Germans who have learned the game here.
According to Wiederhold, the standard is quite high—on a par with that of an average American men’s league team. “I had expected the standard here to be terrible, but was greatly surprised,” he says. “There are a lot of good players and they are getting better all the time.”
German lacrosse championships have been held every year since 1996. Munich is the current record holder, having won the competition five times. On the international stage, meanwhile, the German team has been competing since 1994. In 2001, it achieved its first major success when the team won the European Championship in Cardiff, Wales.
The southern German lacrosse season runs from September to June. In winter, when snow prevents outdoor play, training usually takes place indoors. Over the summer months, there are regular weekend tournaments, which take place in cities throughout Europe, including Berlin, Passau, Kiel, Munich, Prague and London.
