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Kerry Murphy was faking sick when lacrosse found him.
Murphy was in grade school when he stayed home from school and spent all day on the couch watching whatever sports he could find. He didn’t recognize lacrosse, but he loved Duke University for its basketball team and was hooked by the Blue Devils playing a fast, physical sport he never had seen.
Since then, Murphy has grown up along with the sport in the area. He remembers playing on a club team as an eighth-grader with a mixture of Crystal Lake Central and South students. In the following years, he played on the first official Crystal Lake Central teams.
“Lacrosse when I was in high school, no one really knew what it was,” Murphy said. “If you’d tell people you play lacrosse, they’d be like, ‘La-what?’ They didn’t even know what the word was. It wasn’t big at all. It was kind of like just a random sport that a few guys liked. We were able to get teams together for a few high schools. Really, really small, no one was playing it, some people even looked down upon it. … People didn’t really consider it a sport back when we were really young.”
After graduating in 2012, it took Murphy only two years before he was back coaching his alma mater.
The McHenry County lacrosse community has grown over the past decade, from a sport played by a few kids such as Murphy at a few schools into one that will become a fully sanctioned IHSA sport, for both boys and girls, in 2018. This past season, 10 local schools were represented at the boys varsity level, and 2016 also saw Huntley field the area’s first varsity girls team.
That growth has been built by passionate coaches, many of whom played the sport in college, finding interested kids and helping put down roots with high school and youth programs. As numbers grew and some programs began to have success, the visibility of the sport has expanded in the area, but the upcoming move to IHSA sanctioning poses questions for how the next 10 years of evolution will play out.
“I think everyone wants to go through with it, and if they do, that’s huge,” Huntley coach Dominic Saccomanno said. “That’s another state that takes it, and now we put ourself in some sort of legitimacy like some of these other states have been.”
Lacrosse has a richer tradition in other states and even elsewhere in Illinois, but by the mid-2000s, around the time Murphy reached high school, the sport was beginning to take hold in McHenry County.
Club teams began popping up that were loosely affiliated with schools or were co-ops of local rivals such as Crystal Lake Central and South, or Prairie Ridge and Cary-Grove. A 2007 informational meeting about possibly starting a team at Jacobs drew 90 kids. Not all of those kids turned out, but the next year the Golden Eagles debuted with two levels of teams, even if many of the players were new to the sport.
“Our first game was the first time that a lot of our kids had even seen an actual field – we had no lines on our practice area,” Jacobs coach John Bigler said. “In warmups, I was like, ‘All right guys, these are lacrosse lines, here are the boundaries, here’s what we’ve been talking about.’ ”
Around 2008, local school club teams began playing in the Northwest Suburban Lacrosse League (NWS), which by 2010 had merged into the Northern Illinois Lacrosse League (NILAX).
As the programs began to establish themselves, a few rose to the top. Cary-Grove won the 2008 NILAX title game, lost in the 2009 final and then won the 2010 title by defeating Jacobs. The Golden Eagles then won the next two NILAX titles.
In 2013, the local programs once again switched leagues, this time moving to the Illinois High School Lacrosse Association, the sport’s current governing body in the state. The IHSLA has more than 90 teams now and runs state tournaments at two divisions, as well as all-star games, power rankings and more.
During the IHSLA era, Cary-Grove established itself as the dominant team in the the area and began forcing its way into the statewide conversation. The Trojans reached the B-class quarterfinals in 2013, and then in 2015, they were the top-ranked team in their class, started the season with six consecutive wins, entered the postseason ranked No. 3 and advanced to the B-class semifinals.
One of the biggest factors for the teams that have established themselves thus far was the coaching. The most successful programs of the first decade of McHenry County lacrosse all have coaches who played the sport at some advanced level, and many end up descending from the same coaching trees.
Jacobs was led by a former college player in Bigler. Huntley’s Phil Ryan, who coached the Red Raiders from 2012 to 2015, was the IHSLA Coach of the Year in 2000 when at Glenbrook North and highly respected across the state. Murphy played for Saccomanno at Central. Prairie Ridge’s Josh Cole (the 2016 IHSLA Coach of the Year) was an assistant for Ryan before taking over the Wolves.
“We could teach the kids the right way to play,” Bigler said. “When we played against a team that (the coach) didn’t have a lacrosse background, they tried to play it like a football game. Our kids, who are typically smaller, could still play and compete, and I think it really helped other teams grow to know you can’t just throw your weight around against a team that knows what it’s doing.”
At Cary-Grove, it was Brendan Gorman, a New York transplant with high-level playing experience, who changed everything. Gorman helped start the program in 2006 and coached eight of the next 10 seasons, leaving for two years (2012 and ‘13) in the middle. Over his tenure, Cary-Grove went 107-22 and established itself as the top program in the area.
“The reason the high school team was good at a time when there wasn’t a whole lot of youth to feed, again it was the coaching,” said Saccomanno, a former C-G assistant. “Just the understanding of what it took to truly run a full program and team with them that separated them from every other program in the area.”
After the 2015 season, however, Gorman left for an opportunity he didn’t feel he could pass up: returning to New Jersey to coach at a private prep school near home in a more lacrosse-rich state.
“It hurts. I started the program,” Gorman said at the time. “I brought lacrosse, I brought the culture of the sport to the town of Cary, and really to the county of McHenry, so it hits home a little bit.”
A natural fit to replace Gorman would have seemed to be Saccomanno, the Trojans’ top assistant and a former head coach at Crystal Lake Central. Saccomanno, however, already had accepted the head coaching position at Huntley. His reason for leaving the area’s most successful program for a top rival hinted at one of the sport’s other biggest issues: school support.
As the sport has grown in the area, no matter how well any local team has done, they always have remained club teams, not officially part of the athletics department. This means teams have to find their own fields for practice and games, do their own scheduling, pay referees and so on.
In addition to all the administrative challenges, it puts the costs on the clubs, and thus the players. Registration and equipment can cost upward of $800 for new players and still a few hundred each year for returners.
Huntley became the first to change some of that, pulling the lacrosse program under the umbrella of athletics and allowing the team to use on-campus locker rooms and other facilities, plus practice and play on the school’s turf field.
“It made a big difference, it kind of gave us the upper hand,” said 2016 Huntley grad Collin Fischer, the Northwest Herald player of the year. “We have a great field to play on. A lot of schools around here don’t even have their own field to play on, they have to play at Sunset Park or the back field behind their football field because they aren’t allowed on the football field.”
Jacobs is one of the rare club teams to play on campus, but despite consistent success, the Golden Eagles remain a club team. Bigler said he convinced the school to let him rent the campus field like he would any other, but still has to pay for it.
As the team has succeeded, there were talks over the years about joining the athletic department, but it never has materialized. Bigler said he thinks it has helped that he and other coaches are on campus, positioning them to joining the athletic department down the road.
“Some of these other programs, their coaches are all outside the school and so it’s easier to treat them as outsiders because their leaders all are outsiders,” Bigler said. “Whereas we’ve always had coaches in the school, so it’s hard to totally treat us as outsiders because we’re not all outsiders.
“We’ve had good discussions about what we need to do. We model our program off of other athletic programs in the district. We do grade checks, we make sure they’re up to date on physicals and everything. So anything that a baseball player or a track athlete has to go through, our lacrosse players have to go through. ...
“We model our program so it really, hopefully, should be a seamless transition when the district does choose to take on lacrosse. Now, when that will be, I can’t say, because there’s a lot of competing factors, but we’re hopefully making a very strong case for it to be hard to turn us away.”
The path for lacrosse to make its way into athletic departments became clearer in April, when the IHSA announced lacrosse will become an officially sanctioned boys and girls sport in 2018.
It’s a move that has been in the works for years, since the IHSA made lacrosse an “emerging sport” in 2009 and began exploring a state series.
With IHSA sanctioning officially on the horizon, the sport has continued to grow incrementally in the area.
Marian Central, which joined IHSLA last year, came in with support of the school and use of a campus field.
Prairie Ridge, which had gone two years without a win after early success, went 16-2. In addition to the varsity teams in the area, JV teams have emerged on both the boys and girls sides.
Huntley became the first local school to field a girls varsity team.
Community youth clubs, often founded or run by high school coaches, are popping up and becoming feeder systems for more-developed talent.
Nearly everyone agrees state sanctioning will be a great move for the sport, reducing costs and expanding visibility, but there are a few concerns, as well.
Some coaches enjoy the complete control they have now to run a program however they want with a dedicated board of parent volunteers at their service.
More importantly, although it surely will reduce the cost for players and their families, asking schools to take on those costs might be a proposition that ends up discouraging some school districts from fielding teams. Club teams at schools where lacrosse wasn’t a varsity sport would fall even further behind.
“Especially in the age of school funding that we live in now, with the state being a year or two behind on funding the schools, it’s tough to take on new programs when there are other programs that may have to be cut or shelved,” Bigler said. “It’s just very difficult to take on any extra responsibility, especially cost, when finances are so uncertain right now.
“I really think that is the biggest hurdle for a lot of programs throughout the state. Isn’t that there’s interest, I think if anything, lacrosse has shown it’s not going away, it’s growing. We’re always hearing, ‘Oh, we started this club here, this club started up here.’ So if we’re seeing two or three new clubs every year, but a luxury item with all the budget tightening, it’s a tough decision.”
By and large, however, those in the local lacrosse community see it as a promising advance for the sport.
“I think 99 percent it’s going to be better for everybody once it becomes state playoffs and all that stuff,” Prairie Ridge’s Cole said. “Mainly, I think the good thing that’ll come out of it, it’ll just get the sport so much more exposure. In the mind’s eye of parents and young players, it gives it that much more legitimacy, and then it becomes a more attractive option for youth players who are looking to get into lacrosse. They see that it’s being played at the high school level. ...
“The sport has grown so much as it is. When I first started coaching in Illinois, whatever, like 11, 12 years ago, there was only ... maybe 30 to 40 schools playing at that time, and most schools didn’t have feeder programs. Now it’s huge, there’s tons and tons of kids who are in third, fourth and fifth grade playing lacrosse, whereas even as little as 10 years ago that was virtually nonexistent. It’s really taken off.”