Random Lacrosse Players Generator

So the tool gave you a lacrosse player

You wanted a lacrosse player and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand. It covers the men's and women's games, the box specialists and the field stars, and a few figures who belong to the sport's deeper history.

The tool is the simple part. Lacrosse is the oldest organised sport on this entire site, older than every code of football, older than cricket, and it did not begin as a sport at all.

It was a ceremony before it was a sport

Lacrosse is a Haudenosaunee game. The Haudenosaunee, the confederacy of six nations that Europeans called the Iroquois, have played it for something on the order of a thousand years across what is now upstate New York and southern Ontario, and they did not invent it for entertainment.

It is the Creator's Game, played as an act of thanksgiving and as medicine, meant to be watched by the Creator and to heal the sick and settle disputes between nations. Games were played across miles of open country by hundreds of men at a time, for days. French missionaries watched it in the seventeenth century and named it after the bishop's crozier the stick resembled. What the modern professional plays, in a rink in Buffalo or on a pitch in Utah, is a codified descendant of a religious ceremony, and the people who invented it have never stopped treating it as one. Before every match, the Haudenosaunee national team gathers around a spiritual adviser for a tobacco-burning rite.

The stick you are buried with

If one detail conveys the difference between how lacrosse is understood inside and outside the culture that made it, it is this.

Among the Haudenosaunee, a boy is traditionally given a small wooden lacrosse stick at birth. He keeps a stick near him through his life. He is buried with one, because it is believed that the first thing he will do on reaching the next world is reach for it and join the game already in progress there. The stick is not equipment. It is a possession of the soul. Wooden sticks are still made by hand, still used ceremonially, and the traditional makers are treated as craftsmen of consequence.

Hold that alongside a modern lacrosse shaft made of titanium alloy with a synthetic mesh pocket, sold in a sports shop, and you have the whole strange history of the sport in two objects.

The team with its own passports

Here is the most remarkable thing in international sport, and hardly anybody knows it.

The Haudenosaunee Nationals compete in world lacrosse championships as a sovereign nation, sanctioned by the Haudenosaunee Grand Council. They are the only Indigenous team with that standing anywhere in world sport. They travel on Haudenosaunee passports, which some countries accept and others refuse, and their teams have missed tournaments because of it. They are consistently among the best three or four sides on earth, which is not sentiment; they win medals. Several of the finest players on this list are Haudenosaunee: the Thompson brothers, Lyle, Miles and Jerome, from the Onondaga Nation, who between them redefined what the field game could look like, and about one in ten professional box lacrosse players comes from the confederacy. A nation with a population smaller than a mid-sized town competes at the top of a global sport it invented.

The unresolved question of 2028

Lacrosse returns to the Olympic programme at Los Angeles in 2028, for the first time in more than a century. Which raises an obvious question, and it has not been answered.

The International Olympic Committee's rules say that only nations with a National Olympic Committee may enter a team. The Haudenosaunee do not have one, because they are not a country in the sense the IOC means, though they are treated as sovereign in their own reckoning and hold treaties with the United States and Canada. So the inventors of the sport, currently ranked among the best in the world, are on the wrong side of a bureaucratic line at the Games where their game returns. Both the American and Canadian governments have publicly asked the IOC to make an exception and allow them to compete under their own flag. The IOC's stated position is that Haudenosaunee players may play for the United States or Canada if those committees select them. That is precisely the answer the Nationals will not accept. Draw a Thompson from this tool and you have pulled a person at the centre of an argument about what a nation is.

The greatest athlete you did not know played

One name on this list belongs to somebody most people associate with an entirely different sport. Jim Brown is remembered as perhaps the finest running back in the history of American football.

He was also, by the assessment of people who watched both, better at lacrosse. He played at Syracuse, was an All-American, and contemporaries maintained for decades that his lacrosse was the more astonishing thing, because the sport gave his combination of size, speed and balance nowhere to hide. The rules were changed in response to him, which is the compliment sport pays to people it cannot handle. He is a useful reminder that this list, small and unfamiliar as most of its names are, contains athletes of a calibre that would be famous in any sport with more money in it.

What a random lacrosse player is good for

• Quiz and trivia prep. Ask which sport Jim Brown may have been best at. Nobody says lacrosse.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw a player and research the Creator's Game, which is a history lesson before it is a sports one.
• Olympic sweepstakes. Draw players ahead of the sport's return to the Games in 2028.
• Settling a debate. Pull two players and argue the greater career, across the box and field versions.
• Discovering the sport. Draw a name and go and watch them. Start with Lyle Thompson.

Player questions

Who invented lacrosse?

The Haudenosaunee, the six-nation confederacy Europeans called the Iroquois, who have played it for roughly a thousand years. It began as a ceremonial game of thanksgiving and healing, known as the Creator's Game, not as a sport.

Do the Haudenosaunee have their own team?

Yes. The Haudenosaunee Nationals compete internationally as a sovereign nation and travel on their own passports, the only Indigenous team in world sport with that status. They are consistently ranked among the best sides in the world.

Will the Haudenosaunee play at the 2028 Olympics?

It is unresolved. Lacrosse returns to the Games in Los Angeles, but the IOC admits only nations with a National Olympic Committee. Both the United States and Canada have publicly urged the IOC to grant an exception.

Can I pull several players, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a starts-with letter or a keyword the name has to contain.

References

1. Haudenosaunee Nationals. haudenosauneenationals.com
2. World Lacrosse. worldlacrosse.sport