We Built Some New Stuff. Here's Why.

A few years ago we launched an online class on the internet because I couldn't stop thinking about a parent on the sideline.

I know his name, where he played in college and that being quiet is not in his nature. I also know he spent forty minutes coaching from the sidelines. — loudly, over the coach — and then corrected the ref on every call. The ref was sixteen. He had a math test on Monday. He was making fifty bucks.

He filmed one of his kid's goals, posted it to his decent online following and made it look like like a win when they lost 12-2. I'd like to tell you that was unusual. It wasn't. It isn't. And every coach and parent reading this just pictured a specific person, because we all have one.

So we made a class. An online thing for lacrosse parents, about how to not be that guy. It did better than I expected, which says less about the class and more about how badly the sport needed somebody to say it out loud. We've been approached by soccer, basketball and athletic programs nationwide to create something similarly sport specific for them. I refuse, I only care about our sport, the medicine game. This isn't an empire, it is a movement.

That was the beginning. Now we're adding to it.

What's new

A rebuilt website. The old one worked, technically, in the way a 1994 Camry works. This one is faster, easier to navigate, and doesn't look like it was assembled by a lacrosse coach at midnight. (It was. Just a more recent midnight.)

The CLP Field Guide. Ten dollars. It's the thing I wish I had handed the parents of the very first team I coached. Simple and to the point— what to say, what to swallow, how to handle a call that went against your kid, and the single hardest question in youth sports: what do you say in the car on the way home?

It's short on purpose. You have a job and three kids and a bag of gear in the trunk that smells like a crime scene. You're not reading 200 pages. You'll finish this one.

The Coach's Playbook. This one's for the coaches and club directors, and it's the piece I'm most fired up about.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you take a youth team: the lacrosse part is easy. You know the lacrosse part. What nobody prepares you for is the parent who emails at 11pm about playing time, or the sideline that turns on an official in the second quarter, or the moment you realize you have no idea what to say to a grown adult behaving worse than your midfielders.

The Playbook is the preseason meeting script. The language that de-escalates in the moment. And the part where it doesn't work and you need a plan anyway. It's built from actual seasons, not theory.

And the course, but cheaper. Because a course nobody can afford doesn't fix anything.

Why bother with any of this

Here's the number that keeps me at this.

Only about one in five youth officials are still officiating by their third season. Most of them don't quit over the money. They quit over us.

Think about what that actually means. Every kid on your sideline needs an official to play. Officials come from somewhere — usually from teenagers or retired players who love the game enough to try and help. And we are running them off faster than we can replace them.

No refs, no games. That's not a slippery slope, that's arithmetic.

Meanwhile: roughly 1.1% of high school boys' lacrosse players earn any scholarship money. For girls it's about 2.1%. A full ride is around one in a thousand. So the odds are overwhelming that your kid's lacrosse career ends at a high school field with parents in folding chairs — and if that's the last game, it seems worth making sure they enjoyed it.

I'm not telling you not to care. I care. I've been the guy standing too close to the sideline and I've said the thing I wish I hadn't. I'm about as far from the perfect lacrosse coach or parent as it gets.

But the game belongs to the kids. It's their game, their experience, their memory of being twelve. We just get to come along.

Where to start

If you're a parent: Grab the Field Guide if you want something you can read tonight.

If you're a coach or club director: the Playbook. Then make your parents take the course. Seriously — the clubs that do this before the season starts have a categorically different spring. We have some pretty unimpeachable evidence at this point.

If you're a ref reading this: I'm sorry. We're working on it.

New site's live. Everything's there.

Let's clean up the sideline.

— Coach Nuse