i've seen one and a half lacrosse games in my life. one of them was a women's lacrosse game i watched while touring the stevens institute of technology. i was curious about what women's lacrosse was "supposed" to look like, a confusion borne from my experience at that other half of a game: a debacle of mean-spiritedness that illuminated some things about high schooler morality but very little about lacrosse. it was a dumb argument that metastasized into spectacle, a strange outgrowth of berkeley high schoolers' general inability to adequately answer the question: why not?

i must disclose that the "ducks" game - the name given to it for reasons i never learned - was conceived outside of my immediate social view, so take the history i retell here with a grain of salt. it apparently started as a simple question about girls' lacrosse: how does the game work without checking?

one of the fundamental differences between high school boys' lacrosse and girls' lacrosse is that in boys' lacrosse, something called "checking" is allowed. in lacrosse, you catch and throw and hold the ball with a stick with a pocket at the end, and "checking" is basically hitting opposing players with your stick. there are rules and restrictions on when and how you can check, but contact isn't categorically forbidden. this is important because checking is a great way to get an opponent who's carrying the ball to drop it, and a big part of learning lacrosse is learning to keep the ball in your stick's "pocket" even when the opposing team is banging on you. this is done via a technique called "cradling," where you kind of rock your stick back and forth in a way that keeps the ball in the pocket using centripetal force. (i never played myself, but i learned enough to play catch.)

in high school girls' lacrosse, checking apparently wasn't allowed. (i have no idea how true this was, but the girls who played seemed to agree with it, and i'll defer to them.) your stick was for carrying and throwing and catching the ball, and that's it. so one day, some curious boy thought to ask the question: with checking disallowed, is there any way to force an opposing ball carrier to drop the ball?

and if not, is there any point to cradling?

and if there isn't, what else is there to know about playing lacrosse?

i don't know the precise timeline of these questions, but apparently they were tasty enough bait for a trap: the ducks game, to be played between the varsity girls' lacrosse team and a bunch of boys who'd never played lacrosse before in their lives. ("coached" by some boy lacrosse players, they were all athletes of some other type.) the event wasn't officially sanctioned, but the campus at the time wasn't closeable, so when three dozen teenagers showed up at the campus field on a random sunday, the administration couldn't really do anything about it. i'm not even sure if they knew.

the goal was to definitively determine whether girls' lacrosse was Stupid. a handful of spectators also showed up, including me and my genuine curiousity about whether some idiot sixteen-year-olds had actually identified a loophole in the girls' game huge enough to drive a parade float through. i figured that either way, someone would be entertainigly humiliated.

and i was right! unfortunately for anyone with a developed sense of empathy, it was the girls. the same story played on repeat: the girls would have possession, and try to play Actual Lacrosse with cradling and strategy and passing and whatnot, but eventually drop the ball or miss a pass or something, as happens during any lacrosse game. and then the ball would be scooped up by a boy, who would would simply run towards the opposing goal, holding his stick one-handed without any pretension of actually playing lacrosse. he'd be chased the entire time by two or three or four girls who kind of hovered around him without actually doing anything, and eventually attempt a shot, which would either go in or not, and the process would repeat.

the girls' varsity lacrosse team lost 7-2 to a bunch of boys who'd never played the sport before.

what i never figured out is how the hell the girls' high school game is supposed to work. was the boys' strategy actually the optimal way to play the game? and if so, why wasn't everyone doing it? but if it wasn't, then why the hell didn't the girls know how to counter it? i went to that college game at stevens to try to gain some insight, and i learned that - at least in college - checking opponents' sticks is allowed, so if you try to run without cradling, the opposing team will just knock the ball out of your stick immediately. but the high schoolers either weren't allowed to do this, or mistakenly thought they weren't.

i wasn't socially close enough to the principals of this story to have learned if it caused any fallout. for all i know, this was the event that precipitated sweeping changes to the rules of high school girls' lacrosse. (probably not, though.)

but the most berkeley high part of this? in addition to the opposing lacrosse teams and all the rubbernecking spectators was a guy playing fight songs on his trumpet during breaks in the action. after all, it's not a sporting event without a band.