Lacrosse Books

Coaching Youth Lacrosse is an excellent introduction to youth coaching and teaching young lacrosse players valuable skills. It provides all the information you need to coach effectively and help 6- to 14-year-old athletes, both boys and girls, learn and enjoy the game.

This second edition features the games approach to coaching lacrosse, which makes practice more fun for the kids and teaching more effective for you, the coach. Also included are chapters on communicating with athletes and parents, planning and conducting practices, coaching during games and specific programs for both boys and girls lacrosse.

Coach. You just volunteered to coach your daughter's lacrosse team, and you can't tell a defensive slide from an offensive set or the 12-meter fan from the restraining line. Don't despair—Coaching Girls' Lacrosse is here to help.

From your first team meeting to equipment needs to dealing with officials, Coaching Girls' Lacrosse will get you started—and keep you going. You'll learn the basics of girls' lacrosse for 6- to 12-year-olds and you'll find out how the game is changing so you can teach the universal lacrosse skills that will take your players from youth league to college and beyond. You'll be able to school your players in handling the new stick varieties and teach them innovative passing and catching techniques; progressive, relaxed cradling; and creative shots on goal. Here are all the fundamentals of safe physical play, drills for offense and defense, valuable advice about coaching style, and how to make improvement—rather than winning at any cost—the goal of your season. Before you know it, you'll be coaching players who are moving, learning, gaining confidence, and most of all, having fun.

• Survive your first practice and game
• Teach girls' lacrosse as it is played at all levels through college and beyond
• Design effective practices for your entire season using the examples provided
• Match your drills to age and ability
• Make lacrosse fun and rewarding
• Boost the skills and confidence of all your players

Coach. You just volunteered to coach your son's lacrosse team, and you don't know a cross check from a body check or the crease from the centerline. Don't despair—Coaching Boys' Lacrosse is here to help.

From your first team meeting to equipment needs to dealing with officials, Coaching Boys' Lacrosse will get you started—and keep you going. You'll learn the basics of lacrosse, plus how to teach the fundamental skills of passing and catching, scooping, dodging, and shooting through the "games approach," which enhances team communication and decision-making skills. Drills for offensive and defensive strategies are also included, and you'll even learn to develop your own coaching style—one that works best for you and your players. Before you know it, you'll be coaching players who are moving, motivated, and most of all, having fun.

• Survive your first practice and game
• Promote good habits, concentration, and teamwork
• Find answers to common problems in the Q & A sections
• Match drills to age and ability
• Get tips on creating a positive attitude, building team spirit, and getting along with parents
• Make practices fun and rewarding

Mike Pressler walked into the bottomfloor meeting room of the Murray Building and, as he had done hundreds of times over a sixteen-year career at Duke University, prepared to address his men's lacrosse team. Forty-six players sat in theater-style chairs, all eyes riveted forward.

It was 4:35 P.M. on Wednesday, April 5, 2006. The program's darkest hour had arrived in an unexpected and explosive announcement.

Pressler, a three-time ACC Coach of the Year, informed his team that its season was canceled and he had "resigned," effective immediately. While his words reverberated off the walls, hysteria erupted. Players cried, confused over a course of events that had spun wildly out of control. What began as an off-campus team party with two hired strippers had accelerated into a rape investigation -- one that exposed prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy police work, an administration's rush to judgment, and the media's disregard for the facts -- dividing both a prestigious university and the city of Durham.

Wiping away tears, Pressler demonstrated the steely resolve that helped him win more than two hundred games. For the next thirty minutes, Pressler put his personal situation aside and encouraged his players to stick together. He also made a bold promise: "One day, we will get a chance to tell the world the truth. One day."

This is that day.

Pressler, who has not done an interview since the saga began, has handed his private diary from those three weeks to New York Times bestselling author Don Yaeger, exposing vivid details, including the day Pressler was fired, when the coach asked Athletic Director Joe Alleva why the school "wasn't willing to wait for the truth" to come out. "It's not about the truth anymore," Alleva said to the coach in a signature moment that said it all. In addition to Pressler, Yaeger interviewed more than seventyfive key figures intimately involved in the case. The result is a tale that defies logic.

"It is tough to be one of fifty people who believed a story when fifty million people believed something else," Pressler said. "This wasn't about the truth to many of the others involved. My story is all about the truth."

The sport of lacrosse is not only Canada's national sport, but it has recently spawned one of the fastest growing professional leagues around. Outrageous ticket prices and million dollar superstars have made hockey, baseball and basketball a corporate province and out of reach for the average family. As a result, North American sports fans and families have discovered the appeal of the fast-paced, high-scoring, grassroots game of lacrosse.

Lacrosse For Dummies is the most cmprehensive mass market book available on the sport and is the first book licensed by the National Lacrosse League. Packed with photos and line drawing to demonstrate techniques and tips for players and fan alike, Lacrosse For Dummies is an essential tool for all those who play, watch, coach, or simply enjoy this action-packed game.

Thomas Vennum brings together thirteen Native American legends from five lacrosse playing tribes -- the Cherokee, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Seneca, Ojibwe, and Menominee -- to provide a glimpse into Native American life and the role "the Creator's Game" played in tribal culture.

A comprehensive history of modern lacrosse, from the appropriation of the Native American game to its ever-increasing popularity today.
North America's Indian peoples have always viewed competitive sport as something more than a pastime. The northeastern Indians' ball-and-stick game that would become lacrosse served both symbolic and practical functions—preparing young men for war, providing an arena for tribes to strengthen alliances or settle disputes, and reinforcing religious beliefs and cultural cohesion. Today a multimillion-dollar industry, lacrosse is played by colleges and high schools, amateur clubs, and two professional leagues.
In Lacrosse: A History of the Game, Donald M. Fisher traces the evolution of the sport from the pre-colonial era to the founding in 2001 of a professional outdoor league—Major League Lacrosse—told through the stories of the people behind each step in lacrosse's development: Canadian dentist George Beers, the father of the modern game; Rosabelle Sinclair, who played a large role in the 1950s reinforcing the feminine qualities of the women's game; "Father Bill" Schmeisser, the Johns Hopkins University coach who worked tirelessly to popularize lacrosse in Baltimore; Syracuse coach Laurie Cox, who was to lacrosse what Yale's Walter Camp was to football; 1960s Indian star Gaylord Powless, who endured racist taunts both on and off the field; Oren Lyons and Wes Patterson, who founded the inter-reservation Iroquois Nationals in 1983; and Gary and Paul Gait, the Canadian twins who were All-Americans at Syracuse University and have dominated the sport for the past decade.
Throughout, Fisher focuses on lacrosse as contested ground. Competing cultural interests, he explains, have clashed since English settlers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada first appropriated and transformed the "primitive" Mohawk game of tewaarathon, eventually turning it into a respectable "gentleman's" sport. Drawing on extensive primary research, he shows how amateurs and professionals, elite collegians and working-class athletes, field- and box-lacrosse players, Canadians and Americans, men and women, and Indians and whites have assigned multiple and often conflicting meanings to North America's first—and fastest growing— team sport.

Author Biography: Donald M. Fisher is an assistant professor of history at Niagara County Community College.