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.

Next page >

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.