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Eyes of Sports A sad state of affairs |
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by Chris Jaster the Carillon Nobody cares about our national sport. Few people know there’s a professional indoor lacrosse league, and even fewer know Canadian teams have won the league’s title five times in the last six seasons. This 10-team National Lacrosse League employs around 200 Canadian athletes, and almost 80 per cent of the players come from north of the Great White North. The league currently has two Canadian franchises in Calgary and Toronto, although it used to have three others in Ottawa, Montréal and Vancouver, and yet it seems it can’t get any recognition. One of the reasons for this is the poor television coverage the league receives. The Score is the only network to cover the NLL regularly, as it showed 17 regular season games and the NLL All-Star Game. Other than The Score network, it was up to regional television networks to broadcast the league, which was Sportsnet West for the Calgary Roughnecks and Sportsnet Ontario and Sportsnet East for the Toronto Rock. As for American television coverage, NBC was gracious enough to show the All-Star Game and the NLL final live without any other coverage. Like Canada, it was up to local stations to cover the other games. The lack of coverage is rather disappointing considering box lacrosse is very similar to hockey and is as entertaining, if not more entertaining, than hockey itself. The NLL is played in a hockey arena with five on five action. The few differences is that lacrosse is played on a rug rather than ice, there’s a shot clock to avoid slowing down the pace of the game, shots can be taken from in the air as opposed to from the floor level due to the different sticks and there are a lot more goals in lacrosse. Not only is it more common to see both teams score over 10 goals a game, the goals are more spectacular than in hockey. People are often left wondering how the ball finds its way to the twine, only to realize a player shot the ball over his back shoulder while running. It’s also quite common to see the ball bounce off the rug and cross the goal line. This creates a greater challenge for lacrosse goaltenders to spot the ball, especially with people in front of the net. As for the hitting in the NLL, body checks are quite common as is slashing across the wrist to try to get the ball lose from a player’s stick. Fans are also treated to the occasional fight. NLL action provides the same quality of hits as the NHL, although there may not be as many quality hits. With the NHL on strike, one would think that a game so similar to hockey would help take over the media coverage. Instead, the media covered the NHL strike more coverage than it would have given the regular NHL season, screwing over lacrosse once again. Unlike the 10,000 plus people that attend NLL games, it doesn’t seem like the media’s giving it a fair shot to join the ranks of being a major sporting league. It’s time for the media to step up to the plate and defend lacrosse. |