Center Grove won the Indiana Girls Lacrosse Association Class 1A state championship earlier this year.
Submitted photo | Tony Pironello
When Center Grove’s girls lacrosse club team wrapped up its spring season by defeating Park Tudor to win the Indiana Girls Lacrosse Association (INGLA) Class 1A state championship, the team had overcome bigger obstacles than just the defending champion Panthers.
The other hurdles that the Trojans had to clear weren’t as obviously visible, but they existed nonetheless.
Soggy — or non-existent — practice fields. Cultural barriers. Playing against bigger and more established teams. Heck, their first-year coach had no background in the sport.
But that’s where lacrosse is across much of Indiana right now. Center Grove and other schools are trying to lay a foundation where none previously existed.
“One of the challenges with having a development program in lacrosse is that people don’t grow up with sticks and nets,” said Aleks Davis, a Center Grove lacrosse parent who coached at the middle school level for three years. “Usually, there’s somebody in the neighborhood that has a basketball and a goal, or a baseball … or soccer … so there’s some familiarity with it. For here, it’s first time they ever touch it is at a practice — and sometimes, that’s the only time they touch the stick is at a practice. So we have a long way to go before having programs and competitiveness that the Northeast would have.”
Before Center Grove, Franklin, Whiteland or any of the other area high schools with club lacrosse teams can even think about catching up to the lax hotbeds of the northeastern United States, they’ve got to catch up to the northside of Indianapolis first. The likes of Park Tudor, Guerin Catholic, Carmel, Westfield, Hamilton Southeastern and Culver Academies have dominated the landscape since INGLA began contesting state championships in 2000; by winning the 1A title this year, the Trojans became the first school south of downtown Indy to ascend the throne.
What makes that title run all the more impressive is that it came under a rookie head coach that one local television station called a “real-life Ted Lasso” (referring to a popular TV series based on a football coach that winds up excelling in soccer).
Craig Jarrett grew up playing football and eventually had a brief career in the National Football League as a punter before settling into his current role as a teacher at Center Grove Middle School Central. When the newly formed girls lacrosse board — CG’s boys and girls club programs opted to become separate entities about a year ago — went looking to hire a varsity coach, the original intent was to just consult with Jarrett about potential hires.
Instead, they ended up hiring him.
“He said, ‘Are you trying to convince me to coach?’” board president Jason Arthur recalled. “I was like, ‘Well, I was calling about other people, but now that I’m saying it out loud, yes. What do you think?’”
Jarrett, whose daughter Mya plays in the youth program, decided to take the plunge.
“I knew I was going to do my part to try my best to learn the game as quickly as possible,” he said, “and then obviously having some talented girls goes a long way.”
The Trojans, who had reached the 1A state final in 2023 before losing to Park Tudor, went 17-5 under Jarrett this spring, beating South Bend St. Joseph 15-12 in a semifinal match before upending the Panthers in the championship game, 11-7.
Not one to rest on his laurels, Jarrett was already looking ahead at how he could make Center Grove a perennial state powerhouse. He and Arthur are both spearheading efforts to get more girls out for the high school team, specifically seeking out girls who grew up playing youth basketball before getting cut in middle or high school because the sports are so strategically similar.
The challenge is getting them to give it a try.
“You’d be surprised how many girls, people in general, just don’t even know that lacrosse even exists at Center Grove,” Jarrett said.
Efforts to grow numbers at the lower grade levels have been more promising; Davis estimates that 125 girls are playing in the Center Grove youth programs, including several from surrounding towns — and the recruiting push is now starting as soon as girls reach school age.
“Sometimes, kids at the third, fourth, fifth grade level, they’ve already locked themselves in on some sports,” Arthur said. “So this year, we made a conscious effort to go after kindergarten, first and second grade players.”
The aggressiveness in growing the sport isn’t limited to Center Grove. Alumnae of the CG youth program could be found on the high school rosters at Franklin, Roncalli and Southport this past spring, and that’s something that both Arthur and Jarrett happily encourage.
They want girls from all over the southside taking up the sport as early as possible.
“My goal in all of this is to not only help Center Grove girls lacrosse be successful, but I want to grow lacrosse on the southside of Indianapolis,” Arthur said. “All these high schools on the southside have great sports programs; they’re competitive with every single thing. The only difference that Center Grove girls lacrosse has on any other team is that our girls are playing lacrosse longer.”
“We don’t want just Center Grove to grow,” Jarrett agreed. “We want to help out Franklin, we want to — Southport, Perry, Roncalli, Whiteland, Greenwood needs to get a (team) going. … There’s a lot of schools out here on the southside that don’t even have it, or it’s in its infancy.”
The growth has been uneven so far. Whiteland did not field a girls team this past spring because it couldn’t find a coach. Center Grove youth teams rent the bantam football fields for games and practice on makeshift fields behind Maple Grove Elementary school — fields that don’t drain particularly well.
Getting some validation from the state’s governing body for high school athletics might help improve those situations, but it hasn’t come just yet. A vote to officially consider lacrosse as an emerging sport was tabled by the IHSAA’s executive committee in both April and June; it’s expected to be brought up again in August.
An official endorsement in the next year or two might help get the ball rolling — a necessary push for a sport that most Indiana kids’ parents did not play when they were growing up. The adults are often learning on the fly alongside their children.
Overcoming that barrier, Arthur believes, is really the toughest part.
“That’s the biggest downfall, is people aren’t familiar with it; they don’t know about it,” he said. “It’s something new and it’s different, but when they actually take the time and watch a game, they realize, ‘Whoa, hold on — this is just like basketball.’”
Perhaps one day, the IHSAA will grant lacrosse the same official status that basketball has. But in the meantime …
“The only thing that we can do is what we’re doing,” Arthur said. “Continue to grow the sport at the youth level, get a good product on the field at the high school level and do what we can to help these other programs start something for lacrosse so it’s as competitive on the southside as it is on the northside.”
