The evangelist

Troy Kemp picked up a lacrosse stick in college and hasn’t really put it down yet. Seeing a classmate at Colgate University carrying a rubber ball and an odd-looking stick with a net, the New York native tried working with them and, at first, was stymied. “I considered myself a pretty good athlete, and it was frustrating. I’d never been that awkward with anything.” The awkward phase was short-lived. Soon Kemp was hooked, and he’s played lacrosse ever since.

In 1992, when he moved to Chattanooga to teach and coach at McCallie School, Kemp was determined to expand the reach of a sport still largely unknown in the Southeast. The irony is that lacrosse, often pegged as a prep-school pastime, is in many respects more accessible than better-known sports. It doesn’t take years to learn, and it doesn’t require a certain body type.

Instead, Kemp says, lacrosse requires two things: agility and diligence. “The thing that delineates great lacrosse players is who’s willing to work on the small things, like stick skills,” he says. “And it’s a sport that you can get better at by yourself. If you’ll dedicate 10 to 15 minutes a day of doing certain drills on the wall, with a certain kind of frequency and reps, in about a month to six weeks you can develop good enough stick skills, if you have the athletic ability, to compete in lacrosse. If you take an above-average athlete—a kid who wouldn’t make all-state in some sports—and they practice, in two years you can develop a kid who has the potential to play in college.”

Kemp sees just two downsides to lacrosse: Many people know little about it, and the initial cost to outfit a player can be expensive. So for nearly 15 years, Kemp’s been working to fix both problems. To demystify the sport, he founded Chattanooga Lacrosse 1995, recruiting coaches and officials and running camps and clinics in communities from East Brainerd to Signal Mountain and Sequatchie County. And to make lacrosse affordable, he’s steered community groups toward widely available grant funding. (National organization US Lacrosse, for example, gave a start-up team in Sequatchie County free equipment for each of its 20 players.) On the website for Chattanooga Lacrosse, ChattLax.org, parents can sign their kids up for recreational teams; some have loaner equipment.

Now the Southeast seems to be catching Kemp’s evangelical spirit. Participation in lacrosse has grown by 300 percent in the last five years. At McCallie, where Kemp heads up the lacrosse program in addition to serving as dean of admissions, the sport has become so popular that he fields five teams. “I’m just glad that now we have people pushing,” he says, “because literally I was a one-man army for awhile.”

Q. Lacrosse strikes me as sort of a cross between hockey and soccer—that in terms of field position. Is that fairly accurate?

A. Actually, I’d say it’s most like basketball. The kid who makes the easiest transition from another sport would be a kid who played hockey, number one, and basketball, number two. Like soccer, it’s about the spacing, it’s about footwork, and like basketball, it’s about the off-ball movement, picks and so forth. It’s the strategy of basketball that’s most similar to lacrosse, in terms of how players get open and create space.

Q. I’d imagine that, unlike a basketball or baseball coach, you often deal with kids who might be good athletes but who actually don’t have much experience in the sport itself.

A. Sometimes the kid who’s a great athlete, who wants to be great at lacrosse right away, can get frustrated. But honestly, if you work on it for a week, you’ll get better.

I run two camps—one’s a day camp for kids 8 to 12 years old, and the other’s for more advanced kids ages 11 to 15. Of the younger group, you’re talking about 50 kids, and at least half of them are under 10. All these kids are out of Chattanooga, and they just want to play because they like it. Lacrosse is one of those sports where kids like to throw and catch the ball, even if they’ve never played—like throwing a Frisbee. Basically these kids have never played before, and in one week’s time, they’re playing in a game.

Some kids been playing another sport since they were three years old, and they’re burned out. For them, lacrosse is a breath of fresh air—and I think they like the fact that they can play a sport their parents don’t know too much about, where their parents aren’t giving them the post-game lectures about what they did wrong.

Q. At least in boys’ lacrosse, the players wear a lot of padding. So is lacrosse a contact sport?

A. In the women’s game they wear eye protection and gloves for gripping. But they can’t do checking sticks to dislodge the ball. Stick-to-stick contact has to be outside of a 3-foot radius.

In men’s the ball flies faster and harder, and they can check sticks, so they wear helmets, shoulder pads, elbow pads, gloves and optional rib pads. The padding is to protect against bad swings—they’re not the same pads as football.

Kids can do what they call body checking—if a kid’s just running down the middle, trying to score, a defender can use equal pressure trying to stop them. And if any loose ball, in the air or on the ground, is within five yards of a player, those players can basically drive each other off the ball. That’s where a lot of the contact’s made but the better the skill level, the fewer of those hits you’ll see.

Q. In a contact sport like football, size is obviously a big advantage. So to what degree does body type matter in lacrosse?

A. The best player in the country a couple of years ago was about 5-7 or 5-8 and 155. In lacrosse, it doesn’t matter how tall you are…lacrosse is a change-of-direction, center-of-gravity sport. Lateral movement is just as important as flat-out speed.

Q. That really levels the playing field in high school, where boys can change in size a lot from ages 14 to 18.

A. The success of McCallie’s program has never been about how big our kids are. One time we won a state championship where the average height of our team was about four inches shorter than the other team. That would have been a deal-breaker in basketball; in football, you know up front if you’re outweighed by 20 or 30 pounds, it’s going to be tough.

Q. How can a child get involved in lacrosse if he doesn’t attend a school that has the sport?

A. They can come to my camp at McCallie and they’ll play for at least a week there. We do a summer league as well, and then we run a winter indoor league at Chattanooga Sports Complex on Dayton Boulevard. The kids go out there one or two nights a week. They have a U-13 group, a U-15, and then 15 and up. You can go to ChattLax.org and see when the next registration begins. The cost is minimal.

Q. So it’s more accessible to kids than most people think.

A. If a kid’s fast, and a kid’s agile, the hardest part for them to get over is that their daddy or their mother never played the sport or don’t see it as as legitimate as other sports. And then you have to ask yourself the biggest question: Why do these kids play in the first place? I think the number-one reason people play is because they enjoy it, and they enjoy being a part of something bigger than themselves. And then there are the byproducts: I’ve been at McCallie 17 years, and we’ve had over 20 players play in college. My own son is going to Chapel Hill on a scholarship in two years. It’s not just about getting scholarships, but it’s also about helping kids get into great schools.

Learn more about lacrosse:

• ChattLax.org: for information on rec play, tournaments, clinics and other local events
• TNLax.com: a statewide lacrosse resource
• USLacrosse.org: national organization offering grants for start-up teams

Troy Kemp, McCallie’s dean of admissions and head lacrosse coach, is happy to field e-mails from parents who want to learn more about lacrosse or playing opportunities for their children or themselves. Contact him at TKemp@McCallie.org.

“Lacrosse is one of those sports where kids like to throw and catch the ball—like throwing a Frisbee.”

“Some kids like playing a sport their parents don’t know too much about, where their parents aren’t giving them the post-game lectures about what they did wrong.”

“If you take an above-average athlete, and they practice, in two years you can develop a kid who has the potential to play in college.”

“Honestly, if you work on it for a week, you’ll get better.”