When people think of sports related to the United States, many people think of baseball, basketball, and American football. Although all these sports were established in America, the one sport that came before them all was lacrosse. Lacrosse is considered to be America's first sport. It was first invented by the Native Americans well over a century ago and then adapted to be part of the French and Canadian cultures as well. Lacrosse is a sport that has many qualities of many other sports. It is somewhat of a combination of basketball, soccer, and hockey. It is a game that requires speed, coordination, quickness, and agility. It is a game that is full of long field sprints with precision passing and dodging.
Lacrosse was invented by the Native Americans in the early 1500's as a part of their religion. It was played to as a way to help resolve conflicts, heal the sick, and strengthen the men of the tribes. To the natives, lacrosse is still known as "the creators game" because it was also used to help prepare them for war. In early stories of lacrosse, it told of games with more than 1,000 players on each team from the same or different tribes. They would take turns playing in the violent contests on a field anywhere from one to fifteen miles long in games that could last days at a time. Although this is how lacrosse was started, it was drastically changed in 1648 by a Jesuit missionary by the name of Jean de Brebeuf. While on a missionary trip around the Native American tribes of the northeast, he encountered forty eight different tribes playing lacrosse. When he was finished with his mission and returned to Canada, he told the pioneers of the sport he saw and they began to play. Then in 1867, Canadian George Beers standardized the game of lacrosse with field dimensions, set number of players, and other vague basic rules. This helped to establish the first collegiate team in 1877 by New York University.