SIOUX CITY – Morningside College will add men’s and women’s lacrosse as varsity sports in the spring of 2020, and it has constructed new athletic fields to accommodate additional athletes.
Students are so excited about lacrosse coming to Morningside that about a dozen women said they wanted to start competing as a club team this spring.
“I’ve never seen a community this excited for lacrosse,” said Keith Lindgren, the men’s lacrosse coach at Morningside. “And you should know that lacrosse is a perfect fit for this school. It’s a very cerebral game. You go through and you look at the schools that are the top schools competing. They’re the top academic institutions in the country. And that’s what we’re starting to see in the NAIA as well.”
Lacrosse is a team sport where players use a lacrosse stick to carry, pass, catch and shoot a ball into the goal. The sport was created hundreds of years ago by Native Americans, but it recently has experienced a surge in popularity. Lindgren said it is the fastest-growing sport in the United States at the youth and high school levels.
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Cassy Huiras is a Morningside student from a suburb of Minneapolis. She said lacrosse is big in the Twin Cities – that more girls tried out for lacrosse at her high school than for the softball team.
She talked to Lindgren in early November after she learned Morningside was adding lacrosse as a varsity sport. About a month later, she came back with about 12 women who wanted to start playing this spring on a club team. Ben Morhac, the women’s lacrosse coach at Morningside, started in January.
“I definitely would not take responsibility for all of it,” Huiras said. “I had a great group of girls who were rallying for it just as hard as I was.”
Most of the women have never played lacrosse before, but Morhac said they are picking it up fast.
“They are proving already that if they listen, they’ll get better fast, and they’re doing a great job,” he said. “We’re extremely optimistic for them to be successful right away.”
Lindgren already has 12 men’s lacrosse players coming to Morningside from across the country to play in the spring of 2020 on the varsity team. He said many others are still considering.
The coaches said there is no prototypical lacrosse player, that athletes of all kinds can be successful at the sport.
“You can take something from every sport and translate it to our game, whether it’s the rotational aspect of a golf swing or throwing a baseball,” Morhac said. “You can pretty much take something from everything and make it work for our sport.”
