The Strength Of Lacrosse
For Jake Steinfeld, lacrosse and body building are a perfect pairing.
Steinfeld is the creator of Body By Jake, the fitness machine that helps users get in shape and build muscle. He is also the founder of Major League Lacrosse, a league that has been around for 15 years.
Here is how Professional Lacrosse By Jake came to be.
The Discovery
“I opened up Swing Magazine and I open up to a guy holding a lacrosse stick,” Steinfeld said. “Kid’s name was Dave Morrow. What intrigued me was he started a company in his dorm room called Warrior and he was making lacrosse a lifestyle. I said this dude is onto something.”
Steinfeld got Morrow’s phone number and asked him if there was a professional league for lacrosse, because when Steinfeld was in college he had stopped playing the sport due to the fact there wasn’t a league at the time. Morrow told Steinfeld that there wasn’t a professional league.
“I said well, there is now,” Steinfeld said. “And that was May 1998.”
Steinfeld told Morrow that if he could legitimize Steinfeld to lacrosse players, he would use his marketing and television connections he had formed through his Body By Jake shows in the early 1990s to make professional lacrosse a reality.
“We were the most unlikely of pairings but sometimes in life that’s how things work,” Steinfeld said. “And we launched Major League Lacrosse. We announced it in 1999.”
Starting From Scratch
Steinfeld held a summer showcase in 2000, trying to help build interest in the sport. He put up a card table in the Pacific Palisades, California, with information about lacrosse and played catch with a friend. Steinfeld says that people came up and talked about how they played the sport while growing up on the East Coast. This was the beginning of the movement.
“Literally it was like starting from zero,” Steinfeld said.
What has transpired since that summer showcase in 2000 is a professional lacrosse league with eight teams. Steinfeld, a huge basketball fan, tweaked some of the rules of lacrosse and outraged purists. He added a shot clock and two point arc, two staples of basketball.
“When I added those two, they thought that I was the antichrist,” Steinfeld said. “The second I knew we were on to something was [when] we played our first summer showcase game in Columbus, Ohio…first thing that they (the players) did was what? They got out there and started shooting from behind the arc.”
The league has continued to enjoy increases in exposure. A record-high 24 games were presented live on CBS Sports Network this season as well as 20 games on ESPN 3 and 16 on YouTube. Attendance is also at an all-time high as numbers have surpassed 6,000 people a game. There are plans to increase the league’s size to 16 teams by 2020.
But the expansion of professional lacrosse has not always been successful. Teams in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Jersey and Philadelphia folded in 2008 for financial reasons.
“We were too soon. It was too early,” Steinfeld said.
What he means is the seed of lacrosse hadn’t been deeply planted in those areas yet. But now it is starting to change.
Steinfeld says that even though teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco failed, people want to bring it out to the West Coast. The current alignment of Major League Lacrosse has six teams on the East Coast, one in Ohio, and one in Denver. This mirrors Division I men’s lacrosse, where most of the programs are on the East Coast and the farthest west is the University of Denver. Steinfeld says the continual growth of lacrosse depends on the collegiate level.
“That’s the real tipping point,” Stenifeld said. “Once a school like USC flips and becomes a men’s Division I lacrosse program, it’s game over because now you have kids in Syracuse, in Long Island, Baltimore, who have a choice.”
The Progression of the Game
Steinfeld says that he notices a shift in the perception of lacrosse, a sport that has long been labeled as only for East Coast high class white people. He said that aside from the perception, there are three key components to why lacrosse had previously struggled to build a large gathering on the West Coast.
“First is field space, secondly great coaching, third referees,” Steinfeld said. “The simple things, the fundamental things.”
Now there are more middle- and lower-class kids from minority backgrounds who are picking up a lacrosse stick for the first time because it is becoming more accessible. These kids are then falling in love with the speed, physicality and mental aspects of the game. According to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, participation in lacrosse increased 158% from 2008 to 2012. Steinfeld also sees these kids leaving behind baseball and football to play lacrosse.
“You look at kids today and they’re looking to do something different than what dad has done,” Steinfeld said. “And a lot of these kids find lacrosse because they found it on their own.”
Most kids on the West Coast do not have dads who played or even knew about lacrosse, leading to what Steinfeld calls an empowering feeling because the kid is making his or her own decision on what he or she plays. Steinfeld sees this youth movement firsthand.
“If you look at the demographics for Major League Lacrosse, who’s coming to our games, its young boys with their parents,” Steinfeld said. “And you look at Major League Baseball, desperate for that audience. And that’s what we see as the future.”
What started 16 years ago because of a magazine ad has now become a sleeping giant of the sports world. The fastest-growing sport in the nation has a strong backbone in the form of a body building legend.