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Professional lacrosse labour stoppage is troubling

Corey Atkinson

I know your gut tells you that you’re not supposed to sympathize with billionaire National Hockey League team owners in a labour dispute with millionaire hockey tema players, but what about when it’s millionaire and billionaire team owners against players playing for less than full time wages?

That is the situation facing the National Lacrosse League as they locked out their players and moved to cancel their first games of the season, which affects the defending league champion Saskatchewan Rush but also affects minor lacrosse associations across the province and the country.

The Rush and a handful of other teams in the league might be able to survive a protracted labour disagreement about their collective bargaining agreement but it’s incumbent upon the league to figure something out or else teams will simply dry up. 

The league now has two new franchises – the San Diego Seals and Philadelphia Wings – that have been working over the summer to try to build up a fan base and build something, only to have the league opt out of the first couple of games.

The league and the players union have been batting proposals back and forth, which is more than can be said for the NHL and their players’ association when they’re at each other’s throats.

The association offered a one-year proposal to get games going, including ten mandated negotiation dates, but it was rejected by the league.

Lacrosse is a sport on the rise in Saskatchewan. The provincials that were hosted here went smoothly from an organizational standpoint and the skill of the players was evident, particularly at the bantam level. If these players can move on to play midget and junior B, there’s no doubt that some of them can even play at the Rush level. Senior lacrosse 

Saskatoon hosted its first ‘world juniors’ over the summer and while the participation from other nations isn’t at a high level yet, the idea is to try to build the sport and the event so that it’s looked at in somewhat the same way as hockey’s version in late December and early January.

The average NLL player won’t make a lot of money in his lifetime. Certainly not enough to make it their only gig, and that makes a bit of sense considering the season is as short as it is. Teams only had an 18 game regular season last year and all of the playoff rounds were either single elimination or the final, which was best of three. That’s not a lot of revenue from gate receipts coming in. The players understand that.

But what does come in is some serious coin. The Rush is one of the healthiet franchises in Canadian sports and their three playoff games attracted a total of over 36,000 fans to Saskatoon’s SaskTel Centre. A game in the middle of the season against the Calgary Roughnecks got over 15,000 fans. Six other games attracted over 14,000 fans each. Surely the players who the fans were coming to see deserve a piece of that pie.

Calgary themselves had over 17,000 people at the Scotiabank Saddledome for one of their games, 15,000 at another one and never dipped below 8,874. The Colorado Mammoth stuffed 16,000 people into the Pepsi Center in Denver one night and at least 15,000 three others.  

The Vancouver Stealth (now the Vancouver Warriors if this season ends up taking place) played in the much smaller Langley Events Centre but still never dipped below 3,000 fans, which was pretty good for a team that won only two games on the season.

People will come to watch professional lacrosse, drawn by their appeal to the fast game that looks deceptively simple but is intricate in its play design. The people who play the game at the highest level are some of the highest skilled part-time professional athletes around today.

There was an athlete in Moose Jaw who got an outdoor lacrosse scholarship from a U.S. school and upon graduation was drafted in the NLL. His schedule as an adult included working at a New England firm and flying to Philadelphia, or wherever they were playing for the weekend, and then flying back, ready for work the following Monday.

And he wasn’t alone in that kind of schedule. Many of the players don’t even live in the cities they represent. It’s a grueling travel schedule to be a semi-professional lacrosse player, and you’re still at the whim of ownership and management that might trade you at the drop of a hat.

So for a league that feels confident enough to expand to two more teams for this year, certainly a little bit more in the kitty for the players isn’t that much to ask.