Photograph by Scott Rovak
Stop ball-watching!” yells Tony Vermillion, standing and punching the air. “Where’s the man? Where’s the man?” He sits down and hunches forward.
“SLUH’s very good,” he says under his breath, his eyes still on the field. “We’ve got our hands full.” His son Davis is No. 10 on the Rams lacrosse team for Ladue Horton Watkins High School. The team’s scored only once against St. Louis University High School’s Junior Bills, and the score’s getting lopsided. “Get to him! Move it! Move, Davis, help him out!”
Vermillion straightens and lets his shoulders drop, exhaling a fraction of the tension. “They call it the fastest sport on two legs,” he remarks, his lowered tone a better match for his khakis, snow-white shirt, and sockless loafers. Then he leans forward and yells again: “He was in the crease!”—the 9-foot radius around the goal. “Crease rats” lurk at the edge, hoping for just the right moment, the right torque, the right trajectory.
Lacrosse has similarities to all up-and-down-the-field sports, but it has a grace all its own: the intensity and speed of hockey, without the ice and fiery temper; the weave of football, without the head-on collisions; the deft ball control of soccer and basketball, but with a tennis ball–size rubber ball that’s delicately scooped and flung, and caught with barely a flicker. Sticks can get aggressive, but at today’s game, the clashes are more like tumbles, the falls easy as little kids’ somersaults. And there’s something of Harry Potter’s Quidditch in the way the ball gets cradled, the stick twisting back and forth to hold it inside the pocket as the player runs.
SLUH passes deftly and nearly scores again. “Thank God for this goalkeeper, huh?” Vermillion mutters. The Ladue goalie’s a freshman, already varsity. And No. 18, senior Chandler Millstone, was recruited by Colgate University when he was a sophomore. His father’s sitting—literally—on the sidelines, cross-legged at the field’s edge, cheering hard. Nonetheless, SLUH’s winning.
Vermillion braces himself on the bleachers, fingers splayed to either side, eyes scanning the field.
Sam Hurster played lacrosse at Ladue two years ago, then made Brown University’s team. He was one of the few freshmen who played at all, and when an announcer at the Brown Bears’ game against Cornell University read off his name, he said there must be a misprint; surely Hurster was from St. Louis, Md.? “I think it was tongue-in-cheek,” says his father, Steve Hurster.
But he’s not sure.
After all, when Lehigh University recruited Chris Mower’s son, Andrew, from Chaminade College Preparatory School, Chris heard one of the coaches admit that Missouri is a flyover state in the sport. Why land when they can go to a place with a larger concentration of lacrosse teams and cherry-pick? The coach’s comment nagged at him. Then he got a phone call from Andy Kay, the coach at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School (MICDS), suggesting that he and Steve Hurster come to a meeting.
Kay and SLUH coach Mark Seyer wanted to create a single all-star team—the best players in the state—to catch the college coaches’ attention. And that meant finding the raw potential in boys all over Missouri—boys who grew up shooting hoops in the city or hunting in the boonies and who’d never dreamed of playing a sport that until very recently rivaled polo for its snob factor.
“Steve and I had no skin in the game; our kids were gone,” Chris says. “But coaches are coaches; I wrote the business plan, because we needed corporate donations. If we were going to put the best kids out on the field, we had to give all kids the opportunity to play.”
Hurster knew just how much money that would take; he was about to spend roughly $10,000 putting his daughter, who plays lacrosse for John Burroughs School, in summer camps and tournaments on the East Coast. His son Sam, meanwhile, had just scored three goals to lead Brown to a 10–8 win over Dartmouth College. Then he’d scored another three goals—one of them in the last four seconds of the game—to beat third-ranked Cornell 10–9 and give Brown a shot at the Ivy League playoffs.
Hurster—from St. Louis, Mo.—was named all-Ivy in May.
The new nonprofit is called Missouri 22 Lacrosse, or MO 22 for short (although it’s actually MO 30, because you need some spare players for that all-star team). The current roster includes students from Chaminade, John Burroughs, MICDS, and SLUH—as well as from Christian Brothers College, St. John Vianney, John F. Kennedy Catholic, De Smet Jesuit, Eureka, Webster Groves, Kirkwood, and Parkway West high schools. The plan is for representation to widen.
“Traditionally, schools like SLUH and MICDS have been able to dominate,” says Kay. “But it’s growing now, to the point where there’s a huge need to support all these kids.” He’s at the SLUH–Ladue game, sitting high in the bleachers. He says he’s “scouting. [MICDS is] the No. 1 seed right now. SLUH is the No. 2 seed. And we actually might face Ladue in the first round.”
Light dawns. He’s not scouting; he’s spying.
He grins. “We look for trends.”
The setting sun outlines his fine features, his golden-brown beard. He looks gentle, as the dean of seventh grade should—but as a coach, he’s a famous disciplinarian. Kay grew up in Durham, N.C.—his father was a professor at Duke University, and Andy was the ball boy for the Duke lacrosse team. He’s been playing since third grade. He talks about his philosophy of coaching: “You give the ball to get the ball. What do I do if a kid’s not passing the ball? I don’t play him. In my first year, I didn’t have a lot of friends. This is my fourth year now, and they are really disciplined kids.”
A text message crosses his phone’s display: It’s from Vermillion, eight rows down. Kay scans it and nods. “Tony feels there’s a lack of a feeder farm system of younger players to keep the high-school play solid. We’re a nontraditional area. If you look at the nontraditional hotbeds of lacrosse—Denver, Dallas, Southern California—they’re transient communities that have had an influx of young coaches. St. Louis is not transient. It is an encapsulated community. But it’s gonna happen here, too, and the irony is, it’s gonna happen because this is an encapsulated town. All of these guys”—he gestures toward the field—“are going to move back and have kids.”
Parkway West grad Nick Silva moved to Manhattan; now he’s back and coaching for Fontbonne University. His brother Mike coaches the Eureka High School Wildcats. Andrew Mower has already started coaching workshops, and he figures he’ll move back to St. Louis when it’s time to settle down.
Kay breaks off to watch SLUH execute an intricate play, a small smile on his face. “These guys move the ball really efficiently. The better teams, if you had a highlight on
the ball, it would move in a straight line from stick to stick. The teams that aren’t as good, there’s a little more lob to the ball.”
Ten minutes later, SLUH wins 10–3. There’s no whooping, though. When the Rams exit the field, the Junior Bills sit cross-legged in the dusk, listening to a coach solemnly take apart the game, describing which moments worked and which did not. “SLUH’s coaches are always calm,” Kay says, “always analytical, always positive with their kids.”
Andrew Mower was playing in full pads by the time he was in fourth grade. He had a heritage to uphold: His grandfather played for Princeton. Sam Hurster only discovered lacrosse because his neighbor played—and gave him fiddlesticks (mini plastic lacrosse sticks) when he was 9. He was hooked instantly: “Lacrosse was the only sport where you could get away with whacking another kid with a stick!”
In high school, Sam spent hours working on his shots, aiming against his best friend, Thomas Deane, who’s now a goalie for Guilford College. “I used to think I was fast, but in college, everybody is,” Sam says. “You have the ball a much shorter period of time, you make decisions faster, you shoot faster.” He suspects the speed will continue to ratchet up as the field opens to kids of all classes and races and recruiting gets more competitive.
He regularly, patiently explains to other lacrosse players that he is “from St. Louis.” He waits a beat, but rarely sees comprehension in their eyes, so he continues: “It’s in Missouri.” Which he says they probably couldn’t find on a map. Andrew says he daily encounters East Coast kids who “don’t know their geography. They all think I live on a farm.”
For lacrosse, at least, he thinks the problem’s temporary: “Between myself, friends of mine who play currently, and parents like my dad and Mr. Hurster, I think St. Louis lacrosse will be comparable to the East Coast in 10 years.”
SLUH made it to the 2012 finals and did, as Kay predicted, play against MICDS for the Division I Missouri Scholastic Lacrosse Association championship. SLUH was leading 4–3 at halftime, but by the fourth quarter, MICDS had come back and was winning 6–5. SLUH tied with 6 minutes remaining, then scored again. In the last minute of the game, MICDS recovered the ball and took a shot, but SLUH’s goalie blocked it. Final score: 7–6, with SLUH winning the Sennett Memorial Cup.
The trophy was named for St. Louisan Michael Sennett, who played for the University of Notre Dame and coached De Smet’s first lacrosse team. His unexpected death in 2007, at age 38, hit young players hard; his mentoring, coaching, and leadership had been a big part of the sport’s wildfire spread here. His last act for the sport was to establish a lacrosse program at the Mathews–Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club.
If you love the sport enough, you want its doors wide open.
