Lacrosse: East Coast sport is gaining favor in Utah

Tens of thousands of young people in Utah play organized soccer. Basketball standards are common in driveways and churches alike. Baseball, softball, football and hockey all have successful youth programs dating back decades along the Wasatch Front.

But the team sport in the state growing at the fastest rate, percentage-wise, the past 10 years is lacrosse.

That's not to say that lacrosse comes near the participation level — yet — of most of those other more established activities. It's just that prior to 1994, when the Utah Lacrosse Association was established, there really wasn't any organized lacrosse in Utah. Oh, there were a few transplants from back East that might get together to play games in the park, and there were club teams at local colleges, but nothing was organized for kids.

Cut to 2004. This spring more than 1,800 high school students are playing lacrosse in Utah. An additional 950 boys and girls from kindergarten through eighth grade are playing in youth leagues. Add college club teams and adult participation and it's safe to say more than 3,000 Utahns call themselves lacrosse players. While that pales in participation levels to the likes of soccer and basketball, the last decade has been a period of impressive growth for "America's oldest sport" in Utah.

What is Lacrosse?

For many in Utah, lacrosse is just some weird sport people play in New England that is as foreign to them as cricket or Australian rules football.

To people like Soni Taylor, lacrosse is "the greatest sport on the planet."

Taylor played growing up near Boston. When she moved to Utah to attend BYU in the early 1990s, she was disappointed there wasn't really many options for her to continue playing lacrosse. So she did something about it. While there had been a BYU men's lacrosse club team for years, Taylor organized a women's club team in Provo. She's been championing the sport in Utah pretty much ever since and is now the executive director of the Utah Lacrosse Association. While she has a couple of other members on her staff, Taylor is the ULA's only full-time paid employee. The ULA is a regional chapter of US Lacrosse, Inc., the national governing body of the sport in the United States. The ULA's modest offices are located in an industrial park in Sandy just west of I-15.

"It's exciting to see the growth we've had here in Utah," said Taylor of her beloved sport.