MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 1:06 pm
coda wrote: ↑Thu Jul 06, 2023 12:12 pm
I would total agree with middle class sport, but that is a very wide classification. My issue is with the term aristocratic. It is a is mischaracterization and was only used to inflame.
Agreed.
Summers is an old fa-t and undoubtedly has an impression of only hyper wealthy prep schools playing the sport, which would have been true in the Philadelphia Mainline and surrounding Philly region of his early '70's school days attending wealthy public Harriton High, son of two economics professors at Penn. And that's who likely were on MIT's team when he was there.
Harriton plays lax now, at a base cost of $200, plus a big $ for a spring trip to Florida...but I doubt they played lax in his day. Maybe they did...but he didn't... Same league as Conestoga...
But that was never true in the main hotbed areas of Baltimore, LI, and Upstate...but true elsewhere. In the hotbeds, lacrosse was played at the then more 'white' ethnic public schools, e.g. in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties. "white flight" changed the demographics and the funding support for many of the urban schools. A lot of those same sorts of families that had played lax moved into the Catholic schools, and a smattering into the other privates...and into the publics in the counties...which played excellent lacrosse. Basketball and football became the exit path for top black athletes in the urban schools Baltimore area. A few other sports were offered, but lax took an increasingly back seat...there have been ongoing efforts to change this, but uphill climb.
It's fair to say that over the decades the sport was predominantly lower middle to upper middle class, leaning upper sure, but it was never the exclusive domain of the "aristocrat rich"...sure, the top 1% ers had easy access as well, but most of the lax played was in those dense hotbeds. And yes, in all sorts of towns in Canada, Six Nations, etc...that latter group just didn't make up much of what Larry Summers would have seen in the pipeline in his era as President of Harvard.
It's also fair to say that as the sport has grown geographically in the US, it's done so first at wealthy private, then wealthy public schools in each region, then increasingly found in some less well of publics...but not in those which struggle to provide other amenities and opportunities.
AND it's fair to say that our sport has been stubbornly mostly white, though more and more stellar exceptions have been emerging...that said, there were always some exceptions, whether guys like Jim Brown or the great Morgan State teams. But still only 3% at the D1 level.
And that's probably the biggest challenge in a situation where trying to reduce the ways white kids get advantaged over others is a bigger priority, at least at the most selective schools.
Especially well off white kids...
