Not just a sport for posh girls – the remarkable reinvention of lacrosse

In the south of England, it’s a sport mainly for women from private schools, but in the north, well, calling it a posh girls’ game could see you in deep trouble from the working-class men who traditionally play it. As lacrosse returns to the Olympics at Los Angeles 2028, Ben Bloom speaks to the British elite players fighting stereotypes and a lack of funding to bring home gold against the odds...

Trevor Baptiste runs upfield at the World Lacrosse Championships in San Diego in 2023 (Getty Images)

There tends to be a stark geographical divide behind people’s responses when star player Alex Russell describes himself as a British lacrosse international. The further south he goes – around London and the southeast of England – Russell is accustomed to a familiar refrain: “Lacrosse? Isn’t that a posh girls’ sport?”

The assumption is not without foundation. Of the 65,000 people in England who play the sport weekly, 68 per cent are women and, given the historic prevalence of lacrosse within the private-school system, the majority will indeed have emerged from that background.

But further north – predominantly around south Manchester, where Russell is from – there is greater recognition of a men’s sport with a radically different essence. Russell, a state-school-educated IT accounts manager, is part of the remaining 32 per cent of regular male lacrosse players who almost entirely made their way in the sport through community clubs.