Sixes Lacrosse: The Future of Inclusion

Monday, October 16, 2023 will forever go down in history Olympics changed the rhythm of Lacrosse. Beginning with a few enthusiasts’ firm belief that the fastest game on two feet needed to get back into the Olympics, inclusion into the Los Angeles Games of 2028 gives the game an at least four year long boost of unprecedented visibility and therefore opportunity for 90 member nations, double the number of members since 2008. Meeting the wider requirements of the Olympic event, Lacrosse will now be played in a new Olympic discipline of six-a-side. 

Some countries are implementing well defined plans on how to maximize impact whereas other, typically smaller countries (from a player participation standpoint), are still assessing the costs and benefits of spreading their ever thinner resources into another version of the game. The single largest organization in Lacrosse, US Lacrosse, aims to double their participation numbers to 4 million by 2030 (as per their Elevate 28’ commitments). Other initiatives are presently far and few (for instance England’s “Olympic Aspirations). This is against the backdrop of a once in a generation opportunity; this event is, in the words of World Lacrosse CEO Jim Scherr.  “It is a platform like no other” that will expose the game to “more than 4 billion people.”

“It’s a platform like no other,” said World Lacrosse CEO Jim Scherr, “more than 4 billion people will see some or all of the Olympic Games” and “that exposure both as a brand and exposure for our sport internationally is just something that you can’t get elsewhere.”

In Canada, where lacrosse is our national sport and Sixes champions are built, many provincial associations are still waiting for Lacrosse Canada to lead the way ahead in terms of coaching & officiating. To date there appears to be no formal budget position for anything sixes related.  Many European countries have taken a similar stance, waiting for official acceptance of sixes into the Olympics before contributing any substantial time and resources into its development. Arguably for some of these nations with substantially smaller budgets and almost exclusively player financed international teams, this was the only available choice. Others have taken a leap of faith supported by volunteer efforts and minimal player-sourced financing, developing a sixes roadmap of development and infrastructure.  Some teams have at this point had dedicated sixes programs since as early as late 2021 when the first Eurolacrosse tournament for 2022 was announced.  Japan winning the bronze medal at the World Games in Alabama certainly didn’t happen by accident.

One thing is for certain, players, coaches, referees and administrators seem to be getting a lot more serious about sixes lacrosse since the October 16 Olympic Inclusion announcement and according to Jim Scherr “Olympic sports (should expect) a 15-25% surge in participation.”  

The NLL has some experience in enhancing exposure of the game. Establishing franchises in new markets offers a similar 20-30% boost in participation. In many cases, the necessary support infrastructure in the form of coaching, officiating and administration was not available in time, leaving the growth opportunity passed and largely underutilized due to a lack of capacity in one or more aspect.

The Alberta Lacrosse Association commissioned a retention study in 2016, disappointed that although they had a net 100 players more than the previous season, they had still lost 1200 players while gaining 1300. The net gain disguised a loss rate of over 90%.  The study noted that the top 3 reasons players were leaving Alberta Lacrosse were: 1 - Disorganized, 2 - Bad Coaching, 3 - Too Physical (which is also a product of reasons 1 & 2).

The fastest game on two feet now has precious little time to make the most out of the opportunity presented. The future of olympic lacrosse beyond 2028 depends on how ready the sport will be for this surge in participation.  Players from grassroots to the international level need to see progress by their National Sport Organization (NSO) in providing the necessary infrastructure for the sport to become big enough to win the case for continued Olympic inclusion in 2032 in Brisbane (Australia) and beyond.

Grassroots:

Sixes is more than just an Olympic version, it holds the key to more and more sustained growth of the game by lowering barriers to participation at the international, regional and local level. Regardless of whether sixes got into the olympics or not - sixes would have remained attractive for many reasons, especially for smaller emerging countries that are decades away from qualifying for the Olympics and smaller provinces/states/districts/territories looking to grow lacrosse locally. Here the participation in international tournaments is fully playerfunded, volunteer organized and relies on player pools with marginal scope for selection. A player pool of 30 players means taking 16-18 players (perhaps all 30 if sending 2 teams) to an international event. Half the challenge is the player pool, the other half is the finance and required organization. 

The ELF/PALA/AAL and others would have been remiss not to make sixes their baby, with many countries having less than a few hundred total players (at best) to begin with. Some have argued that many of the 90 member countries in World Lacrosse are just shell corporations (copy & paste), with almost no real traction or growth prospects. This points at the conundrum some countries face. Without using non-resident players there cannot be an international team. Non-resident eligible players also limit the number of players returning to the nation with the wealth of experience international competition offers. Smaller roster sizes will allow these nations to faster establish locally resident rosters that elevate the local play beyond token tournament participation. Even this is no guarantee, as any NSO can field players as it pleases within the confines of eligibility. Sixes offers the chance to use more resident players. For some NSOs this might become a tough trade off between competitiveness from using non-resident players offering the chance of improved rankings versus the long term growth possibilities from using less competitive resident players. 

Sixes is the tool that’s needed to grow the sport at the grassroots level. Practically speaking, it can be played any time, anywhere, and at minimal cost outside of initial start-up equipment. Getting rid of the long poles, reducing the size of the rosters and the number of players on the field, allows for a sixes style that is packed with action and much more attractive to participants (also far less tactical than field lacrosse).

This applies especially to school Lacrosse. A Phys. Ed. class of 20 could barely offer the chance to scrimmage during sessions, whereas sixes requires less space and easily accommodates two teams in a group of 20 players with at times wildly different levels of ability.  For anyone interested, I made a video on what it would take to arm the Phys. Ed. teachers with everything they would need to do a lacrosse unit and be able to make a grade, with supplementary work products alongside skills development protocols and assessment.

Despite provisional Olympic acceptance, getting sixes lacrosse into grassroots programming has been no easy task thus far.  While technical director of Lacrosse New Brunswick, I was pushing for high schools to switch over to sixes lacrosse in place of field for the 2022 season.  The stakeholders voted against this recommendation, citing coach capacity issues, which was a fair concern.  High School field lacrosse has been a modest recruiting tool in New Brunswick and they have every right to want to continue doing things the same way they always have.  

Yet, sixes lacrosse makes for much better skills development. It also makes it easier for schools to enter a team into a league where they technically only need 6 players to play a game. My official stance is that elementary schools should play intramural sixes lacrosse all the way up to junior varsity in high school, with varsity lacrosse players playing traditional field lacrosse in an effort to attract NCAA scholarship money (perhaps with division 3 varsity still playing sixes).

Where New Brunswick is a microcosm, World Lacrosse is figuring things out on a macro level. Sixes lacrosse needs to provide meaningful competition and developmental pathways for the non-elite countries, more than the elite ones. Associate World Lacrosse Members countries like Luxembourg are often an afterthought. They need a template for how to run intramural leagues, club and provincial leagues and tournaments; this would work wonders for uptake of the game.  Speaking to Canadian Lacrosse, we need sixes to be played at the Summer Games for every province and should even consider playing it at the Canada Games instead of box lacrosse; although I am also sensitive to the fact that the box lacrosse discipline is a uniquely Canadian cultural contribution to the game.

Lacrosse needs guidance and training for teachers, coaches and referees. Lacrosse Canada has thus far made an optional module for sixes and don’t want their level 1 officials jumping right into sixes, so they’ve said. By 2024, it was suggested that there should be a full clinic to get certified as a sixes official. They are also seeking a coaching module to be mandatory by January 2024.

Below is a graphic with the major differences between the 3 disciplines of box, field and sixes lacrosse for anyone who is interested.

High Performance:

“We will grow sixes as a discipline, help our teams become more proficient at sixes and provide support for coaching, strategy and development to have as many competitive teams as possible in the discipline while also reducing the gap between elite and emerging nations,” added Scherr. “Not only that, the qualification cycle – whether it’s team selection, world championships or the Olympic qualification process – takes on significantly more important public visibility given the fact that it’s now the road to the Olympic Games.”

As of right now there are 6 men’s and women’s teams slated to compete in the Olympics, with World Lacrosse pushing to have that number raised to at least 8. It is the ultimate carrot for any 19 to 25 year old lacrosse player from one of the top 12 ranked countries in the world at sixes (the top 8 are based on World Sixes Championship results):

Men’s

1 CANADA

2 UNITED STATES

3 JAPAN

4 GREAT BRITAIN

5 HAUDENOSAUNEE

6 AUSTRALIA

7 GERMANY

8 ISRAEL

9 JAMAICA

10 ITALY

11 PUERTO RICO

12 IRELAND

Women’s

1 CANADA

2 UNITED STATES

3 AUSTRALIA

4 GREAT BRITAIN

5 ISRAEL

6 JAPAN

7 HAUDENOSAUNEE

8 CZECH REPUBLIC

9 PUERTO RICO

10 NEW ZEALAND

11 IRELAND

12 GERMANY

If you are a european country, the run up to the Sixes World Championship in 2026 (in China my sources are telling me) is huge for qualification, particularly the 2025 European Sixes Championship. It remains to be seen how many teams from Europe will be eligible to compete in the World Championships, but qualifying from Euro’s to World’s will undoubtedly be a major accomplishment. In the interim, the annual EuroLax Sixes tournament in February in Faro, Portugal, remains the major competition, with Ghent offering another intermediary opportunity to compete internationally in June. Participating teams should have at least a 2-year plan in place in an effort to qualify for the Worlds at this point…

The national teams at these tournaments, up until now, in many cases have been stocked with non-passport holding hand-me-down pro/ncaa Americans such as Italy, France, Israel & Jamaica. While on the other end of the spectrum there are teams such as Belgium, Denmark and Germany who have entirely domestic rosters. Germany took only players who were hard workers and team players - in their athletic prime, ones that would be around for the Olympics, so I’m told. Certain countries are also more adept as passport printers (Italy, Ireland), which will certainly play a role in the depth of some of the countries at the qualifiers and most certainly for the Olympics itself. I’m told that the nature of the eligibility requirements will be publicly released in a few weeks time.

One just as meaningful conversation has to do with how to provide meaningful competition for emerging (tier 2) countries that perhaps can’t even field a team without the help of non-passport holding imports? When I played in World events in the past you were allowed 4 non-passport holding players as long as they had at least one grandparent having documented proof that they were born in the country they were competing for. I believe that this rule will be abolished as the gravity of these euro/world championships evolve. However, I’m told that the current rule will still be in effect for the 2024 World Box Lacrosse Championships.

It’s expensive to attend these types of tournaments and most countries (along with their top players) can only attend a finite amount. Furthermore, nobody wins when games are a blow out. A tiered system where tier 1 is passport holders only, all olympics rules and you meet those requirements and you are in; versus a tier 2, where you filter out the nations that don’t have all of the requirements and still provide them a platform to engage in developmentally appropriate competition, has got to be the way forward.

Jim Scherr said “we will grow sixes as a discipline, help our teams become more proficient at sixes and provide support for coaching, strategy and development to have as many competitive teams as possible in the discipline while also reducing the gap between elite and emerging nations.” I guess time will tell to what degree that these resources are provided...

Interdisciplinary Cooperation:

Aside from these warm-up tournaments being an expensive undertaking (currently - who knows if they will be subsidized moving forward), the next big complaint I have been hearing is about athlete burnout, and rightfully so. In Canada, box and field lacrosse provincial programs are already competing for the same elite players to represent for their province at Nationals; adding sixes to that equation can make the physical and mental strain even more demanding for these players. What is needed is interdisciplinary cooperation in the form of a yearly training plan (YTP), provided by World Lacrosse or Lacrosse Canada, which allows everything to co-exist.

In working my way through most of the lacrosse coaching courses available in Canada, one of the primary components from one level to the next was building out your “YTP.” You eventually submit it to Lacrosse Canada during your evaluation process and they give you feedback, making you do corrections until it meets their standard, or accepting it as is. The problem is that nobody knows what the standard is because Lacrosse Canada doesn’t even have a YTP of their own. Competitive conflicts continue to be a problem between box and field, provincial and national associations, to this day and will be even more so now that we’ve added sixes to the mix.

How much box is the right amount? How much field? How much sixes? Field already takes a backseat to box in Canada, with rep box lacrosse generally running from May to August (4 months). Monthly field lacrosse provincial team tryouts get mixed in during the second half of the season alongside a few practices after box provincials/nationals have ended and then it’s off to field lacrosse national championships in early September (usually Labour Day Weekend). Let’s call that 4 months of box lacrosse and 1 month of field lacrosse. In the USA and most European countries, it’s upwards of 6 months of field lacrosse from Spring to Summer, with box (or some hybrid form) being played indoors during the winter months (November to March) for 1-5 months depending where you are and how much appreciation they have for box lacrosse. England, for example, only has one month of box lacrosse in December, while the Czech Republic plays something similar to a Canadian schedule.

As an assistant coach for Team Belgium Sixes Lacrosse from 2021-2022, we took on the task of building a YTP for Belgian Sixes Lacrosse that could co-exist with field and box. The 2-year plan included the 2 major sixes competitions per year that I mentioned, Faro & Ghent (5 months apart), with one in-person sixes training camp day per month during which box & field lacrosse were forbidden to practice. 8 out of the 12 camps per year were to be geared toward technical/tactical development, whereas the other 4 would be geared towards team selection and preparation for the upcoming tournaments. In the weeks in between those monthly camps, we planned monthly online webinars and also expected players to complete the weekly individual and small group training protocols we laid out for them. Of course, not everything went exactly according to the “utopian” plan, but we did our best to accommodate the plan within the political and economic realities of the time (that being a time when sixes hadn’t really taken a foothold as a result of the Olympic announcement).

I was recently speaking with one of my favourite coaches of all time, Team England Box Lacrosse Head Coach and Victoria Shamrocks legend, Walt Christianson, who says he never tells guys not to play field, for instance. All that he tells them is that if they play box, they will be better at field and 6’s.

We can’t get overprotective based on the fear that sixes may somehow cannibalize the other disciplines. What we should be fearful of is conflicting programs being put out within community, territorial/provincial/state and national organizations. We need to work together! Decisions need to be made with the intention of not letting that cannibalism happen, while finding solutions and best practices for their co-existence. It’s no different from allowing for the coexistence of the multi-sport athlete.

It gets hard to schedule any type of sixes in spring and then they jump right into box, for Canadians, as the facility available (fields & arenas) generally doesn’t allow for it. In fall you get hockey, basketball and football opening up, which is hard to compete with at the grassroots, but c’est la vie. If we are speaking to “high performance” and what fits best in a YTP, the easy solution for me is to host any annual provincial/state and national sixes tournaments in the fall, on Canadian & American Thanksgiving Day weekends.

Conclusion:

In high performance, we really should only be talking about U17+ for national championships, according to the science. Lacrosse Canada voted against its own committee's recommendations at the 2023 SAGM in Vancouver, after a scientific panel clearly delineated that U15 shouldn’t have anything higher than Region Championships and U13 nothing more than Provincial Championships. Internationally, they will only be hosting sixes tournaments for as young as U20 for instance, which is what they do for all other disciplines as well. This makes scientific sense.

Stepping back from the science for a second, we need to get it right politically as well. I’ve heard people say, “what about the Haudenosaunne problem.” First off, I don’t see it as a problem, I see it as an opportunity that our leaders need to come up with the right solution for. Another thing I’ve heard is that allowing one sovereign Indigenous Nation opens up the door for all other Indigenous Nations not recognized by the IOC. Great! If the IOC wants to get it right the IOC needs to #decolonizetheolympics and be true champions of INCLUSIVENESS.

#DECOLONIZETHEOLYMPICS

Lastly, controlling what we can control, we have to be able to get it right here in Canada if we are ever going to get it right internationally. Yes, the Canada Games Council included lacrosse in 2022 as an alleged gesture of reconciliation, yet they also eliminated team Haudenosaunne themselves in the process, forcing these athletes to play on the candian provincial teams if they wanted to participate. If you want a true National Championship in the country we call Canada, here’s my solution. Teams from Indigenous Territories within Canada should take their NAIG (North American Indigenous Games) ranking and be able to qualify for the Canada Games based on certain defined criteria. If team Eastern Door qualifies over New Brunswick, so be it. Let the top 13 provinces/Indigenous Nations qualify. Otherwise, perhaps raise the stakes and allow 15 or 16 teams?

If we want to be allies to Indigenous folks in Canada, and in this case get the Haudenosaunee in the Olympics, it starts right here in Canada with Lacrosse Canada and the Canada Games Council getting it right. So far they have failed. I can say that as a guy who has failed many times before. Time to own it and get better.

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