Isaiah Cree has had a lacrosse stick in his hand since the day he was born — literally.
On the day of his birth, Cree’s great-grandfather gave him a wooden lacrosse stick he had hand-crafted, engraving the baby’s name and date of birth on it.
“Ever since I could walk, I’ve had a lacrosse stick in my hand,” recalled the 21-year-old Cree, who grew up on the Akwesasne Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York.
Cree was looking forward to continuing his lifelong passion for lacrosse when he entered McGill University two years ago. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to play as a freshman because of a torn ACL in his knee, and the McGill lacrosse season was wiped out last year — along with all university sports in Quebec — because of COVID-19.
Cree could understand that.
What he can’t understand is why he can’t play lacrosse for McGill this season.
Lacrosse was one of nine sports McGill decided to cancel this season, affecting 15 teams (men and women). Nine sports (affecting 16 teams) were selected to compete, including basketball, football, hockey, rugby, soccer, swimming, track and field, volleyball and cross-country. The other eight sports that were cut, along with the lacrosse team, were baseball, golf, field hockey, badminton, rowing, alpine skiing, artistic swimming and woodsmen.
Most of the sports that were cut are Level 2 sports at McGill, which don’t have full-time coaches or the same administrative and medical support as Level 1 teams, which have full-time paid coaches. The only Level 2 teams that were selected to compete were rugby, track and field and cross-country.
“The pandemic has increased the level of care required for medicals and general operations of all competitions,” Geoffrey Phillips, McGill’s executive director of athletics and recreation, said in an email response to questions about the school’s decisions concerning sports teams. “Consequently, we had to weigh several safety concerns against the level of administrative oversight, including personnel capacity, resource availability, travel restrictions, financials, medical requirements and league governance structures for each team. As an example, teams who participate outside the regional or national sport governing bodies (e.g. the RSEQ, OUA or U SPORTS) presented considerably more challenges and were deemed at higher risk.”
The Level 2 lacrosse team competes in the Canadian University Field Lacrosse Association and had a perfect 10-0 record in the East Division in 2019 before losing in the semifinals of the national championship tournament. The McGill team, which had five Indigenous players on the roster in 2019, has won two national championships, in 2012 and 2015. The 2021 CUFLA season began Sept. 18 with McGill the only one of the 14 teams not taking part. Teams competing in the East Division this year are Bishop’s, Ottawa, Carleton and Queen’s.
Cree said he and his teammates were in “complete shock” when they learned from a news release on July 21 about McGill’s decision to cancel lacrosse this season.
“I don’t want to say lacrosse is better or anything,” Cree said in a phone interview. “I feel like every sport should have a season this fall, but I just don’t understand their way of choosing who played and who didn’t. I just find it upsetting when teams like football are playing and they struggle to have a winning record every year but lacrosse, which just came off a 10-0 regular season, was cut.
“I find it kind of ironic because McGill tries so hard to say that they want Indigenous students, they want a large Indigenous population,” Cree added. “But they cancel their most Indigenous athletic team and probably the most diverse team at McGill. Everyone at First Peoples' House (where Cree lives on campus with other Indigenous students) is pretty upset with their decision.”
In his email, Phillips wrote: “Our support for our student-athletes is unwavering. McGill remains committed to promoting Indigenous equity and inclusion on our campuses, and to contributing to the broader, national imperative of reconciliation. We are proud to provide our Indigenous Athletic Financial Awards, which will be given out again this year, as they have been since their inauguration.”
Tim Murdoch is also very upset with McGill’s decision to cut lacrosse. He coached the McGill team from 2003 until 2019 before stepping down, but remains on the Friends of McGill Lacrosse advisory board. Murdoch noted that the lacrosse team is basically self-funded by donations from amumni. He added that the team’s financial accounts are frozen by the university and that new coach Nic Soubry no longer has an office or even a McGill email address, making it almost impossible to recruit future players.
“It's Indigenous Awareness Week (Sept. 13-24) at McGill and I keep coming back to that,” Murdoch said in a Zoom interview. “It’s very upsetting and I get very emotional about that — I’ll try not to. But we worked so hard as a group to be inclusive, we’re so proud of our Indigenous student/athletes.
“Honestly, I look at McGill lacrosse as a national example of Indigenous inclusion,” Murdoch said. “This is a sport that has been around forever … long before James McGill arrived, there was lacrosse.”
Sports Illustrated recently published a daily cover story by Ben Pickamn online under the headline: "As lacrosse acends, a reckoning with its past." The story notes that in Canada, the recent horrid discoveries of unmarked graves for Indigenous children at former residential schools “have forced a humbling conversation about the sport’s role in ‘cultural genocide’ against Indigenous peoples.”
Pickman notes that lacrosse — a game invented 1,000 years ago by Indigenous peoples — became an assimilative tool used at residential schools, “which is extraordinary,” said Allan Downey, an associate professor at Hamilton’s McMaster University and the author of The Creators Game, which looks a Indigenous identity formation as it relates to the sport.
“They (used) an Indigenous element — an Indigenous game that has deep connections to the epistemologies of Indigenous peoples — and they (used) it to assimilate Indigenous youth,” Downey told Pickman.
Murdoch said his personal goal at McGill was to build a lacrosse team that was roughly one-third Indigenous, one-third English and one-third French.
Now, Murdoch is worried about the survival of McGill’s team.
“Lacrosse is a lot more than just a sport, especially for our Indigenous players,” he said. “It’s Canada’s national sport, along with hockey.”
Cree is an international development major at McGill and has one more year of university left after this one.
“Hopefully, I get one full season playing lacrosse at McGill,” he said.
Link to original article
Thanks to the Montreal Gazette, author Stu Cowan, and photographer John Kenney.
Email
Print
