Like soccer before it, another nontraditional sport is exploding in schools across the Triangle: the fast-paced Native American game of lacrosse.

On Saturday, as hockey fans watched the Carolina Hurricanes compete in the Stanley Cup playoffs, hundreds of boys and several girls crossed sticks and hurled balls across the grassy fields of Cary's SAS Stadium, a soccer mecca where high school lacrosse championships followed a day of all-star exhibition games of middle-schoolers.

"I gave up soccer, baseball and basketball," said Graham Kawula, 14, of Chapel Hill, a goalie on the Durham Blues all-star team. "I focus all my attention on lacrosse now. It's the thrill of it."

Amid the distraction of Duke University's lacrosse scandal, the sport is surging in urban North Carolina.

"Even though you had good college teams here, on the youth level it was a cult," said Ed Raymond, 48, coach of the Rival Lacrosse club in Durham and Chapel Hill.

But the region's pastimes are evolving. The traditional American sports triad of football, basketball and baseball now has many challengers. First there was soccer, followed more recently by hockey. Lacrosse is catching up.

The matches Saturday featured teams from the Triangle as well as from Charlotte and Greensboro, where lacrosse took root sooner.

Long a fixture at Triangle universities, "the fastest game on two feet" is popping up at more and more middle and high schools across the region, where its players like the sport's simple rules and the mixture of speed, strength, endurance and coordination it demands.

"You need only one attribute to be good at the game: You can be fast and be good, you can have skills and be good, you can be smart and be good," said Raymond, a Durham chiropractor and a former college lacrosse player from New York. "It's just a lot of fun to play, period."

Players say lacrosse draws on the throwing skills of baseball, the running of soccer, the hitting of football and the playmaking of basketball. Some say it's cool because it's an "extreme sport" or because it's fairly new here.

"Kids in class talk about it so much that they're getting detention," said Alex Zajdel, a seventh-grade lacrosse player at Raleigh's Franciscan School.

The new soccer

The sport is growing so fast, coaches and officials say, that it faces a shortage of officials and playing fields.

"We're a baseball family, but that has taken a turn," said Irene Kress of Raleigh, whose seventh-grade son Bryan plays lacrosse. "I hate to say it, but I think we're switching over to lacrosse. It's a fast-moving, exciting game."

At the weekend lacrosse matches, entrepreneurs and team boosters set up tables and tents hawking lacrosse T-shirts, ball caps, flags, stickers, equipment and playing lessons.

The Triangle's Capital Area Lacrosse League has grown to include about 350 middle- and high-school players.

Nationwide, the number of high school players almost doubled in the past four years, to about 48,000 girls and 60,000 boys.

"It has caught on fire," said Mark Zajdel, a coach of the Franciscan School's team, a landscape business owner and Alex's dad. "You watch: Soon it will be 'The SAS Lacrosse Stadium.' "

Maybe, although lacrosse remains an overwhelmingly white male sport more common at private academies than public schools. The playing equipment costs about $200, and most schools don't provide it.

But this year, for the first time, enough North Carolina schools fielded teams to secure the tournament endorsement of the state's high school sports association.

A Wake County school official said 12 of Wake's 19 high schools will have boys lacrosse teams next year -- and most of those will have girls teams, too.

The girls lacrosse players from Raleigh's Broughton High School and their parents met for a pot-luck dinner Friday night to celebrate the team's successes -- making it to the second round of the state playoffs and increasing fan attendance -- and to look forward to next year.

"I think it's going to catch on," said graduating senior Rachel Rice, 18, the team's top scorer and most valuable player. "It's an awesome sport."

Fighting a stigma

Lacrosse has received widespread attention lately, but not the kind its players want.

The sport's rise has come amid one of its deepest injuries: the unresolved scandal involving the Duke University lacrosse team.

Three Duke players face criminal charges of kidnapping and raping a woman hired to dance at a March 13 party in a Durham house where three of the team's captains lived.

The men maintain their innocence and say the accuser is lying.

Some local lacrosse players, parents and coaches worry that the Duke incident has hurt the sport.

"This is a scandal that affects all of us," said Chris Estes of Raleigh, a coach of the Durham Tunes middle school team and a former UNC-Chapel Hill lacrosse player. "We worry that parents will say, 'I don't want my kid playing that sport.' Lacrosse has a bit of a rowdy reputation. It's up to us to help these kids change that."

Others lacrosse veterans hope the national attention will prompt people to learn about the sport and to play it. And some have turned the episode into a lesson.

"We've used the Duke situation as a positive," said Tim Slone, 48, the Raleigh Franciscan School's lacrosse team manager and a research manager at GlaxoSmithKline in Research Triangle Park. "Our coaches sat our players down and told them: 'Hey, look, you've got a responsibility to yourself and your family, you've got a responsibility to your team, and you've got a responsibility to your school.' "

Most young players, though, say they're not focused on the Duke saga -- they're having too much fun playing the sport.

"I feel it's putting a negative image on lacrosse," said Michael Wheelan of Cary, 13, who has played the sport for four years. "People should come out and watch one game. Come see what good lacrosse is about."

After a game a week ago at Raleigh's Dorothea Dix soccer fields, Weston Sadovy, an eighth- grader at Raleigh's St. Timothy's School and a player on the city-league Raptors team, lingered to practice his stick-handling skills. While talking about his love for the sport he embraced after giving up soccer and basketball, he twirled and dipped his stick, tossing a lacrosse ball under his left leg and up into the stick's pocket.

"Most of the people at my school think I'm a little hard-core," said Weston, 14, as he tossed the ball to himself over and over.

That might well change.

"A year ago, most of the people at my school didn't know what lacrosse was," Weston said. "Now just about everybody does."

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