Lacrosse finds a new home at Ballou and two other D.C. public high schools

Holly McGarvie needed to get a few things out of the way before she opened practice for Ballou’s first girls’ lacrosse team last month.

No, the coach told a few players who asked, you cannot swing the lacrosse sticks at opposing players. Yes, to those curious but still skeptical, this is a sport unlike any you’ve ever seen or played, especially since nearly half of her roster had never previously participated in an organized team sport.

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Members of the newly-formed Ballou girls' lacrosse team talk about why they have embraced the sport and how the team was formed.

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 Three high schools in the District — Ballou, School Without Walls, and Coolidge — have added lacrosse this spring. Ballou’s team is guided by a former all-American player at Princeton, Holly McGarvie.

But her most glaring point was unavoidable for all of her players at the Southeast school, whose enrollment, according to D.C. Public Schools, is 100 percent African American.

“You’re going to play games where you see people who don’t look like you,” McGarvie said she told her players.

That may be starting to change in the District. Three D.C. public high schools are offering lacrosse teams for the first time this season – Ballou (girls only), Coolidge (boys only), and School Without Walls (boys). They join Wilson, which has had a girls’ team for more than a decade, and debuted its boys’ team last season. School Without Walls has also fielded a girls’ team in the past.

Ballou’s girls will play their first game Wednesday at Wilson.

“I’m ready to play already,” said sophomore Chard’E Montgomery, who had never been on a team before, but was persuaded by McGarvie to give it a shot.

Each school has started its team independently; the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association isn’t sponsoring a league this season. DCPS Athletic Director Marcus Ellis, however, expressed enthusiasm, not only for interest in a new sport, but particularly that it’s coming from girls, for whom athletic participation has lagged far beyond boys in the DCIAA.

“It’s really building something where there was nothing,” said McGarvie, 24, a two-time all-American midfielder at Princeton who is in her first year teaching biology at Ballou. “I’ve never had a whole team of girls who’ve never played before. I’ve done individuals at clinics, but never a whole team. I approach it like, ‘What would I want to teach them that I didn’t learn?’ ”

While the sport’s efforts to reach new players and fans outside of the mid-Atlantic have been successful, lacrosse’s national governing body is now focusing on penetrating the inner cities and changing the perception that lacrosse is a suburban game. Ballou, located in Congress Heights, has a gleaming artificial turf field, but is otherwise surrounded primarily by an area awaiting urban renewal. Lacrosse is not a sport found in the area’s parks and playgrounds.

“Lacrosse has not been a sport that has been accessible to kids from some socio-economic standpoints,” said Steve Stenersen, President and CEO of U.S. Lacrosse. “We’ve done a good job in this area, but we’ve got to do a heck of a lot more.”

Stenersen said stereotypes are a huge obstacle for the sport’s efforts to introduce itself to inner-city athletes. He recalled the struggle to start the Baltimore City Middle School Lacrosse League in the late 1980s.

“One of the challenges in the Baltimore league,” Stenersen said, “was that they viewed it as a white sport. [Players] were gone in a week [as a result] from peer pressure from friends who said, ‘Why are you playing that sport for white kids?’ ”