On Woodland Drive, it's all about lacrosse

On a woody, hilly street there are three houses that apparently have little in common. One, set on a cul-de-sac, is stucco. One is brick, complemented by a yard filled with tall shrubs and the third, down the hill, is also brick.

Judy Kovler and Denise Magruder, who own the stucco and tree-lined yard, respectively, are frequent walking partners. They live about 150 yards apart, and their sons, who went to rival high schools, are teammates on the men's lacrosse team.

A testament to how closely knit the sport of lacrosse is, junior Evan Magruder and sophomores Mark Kovler and Brendan Reilly all live within a half-mile of each other on Woodland Drive in Washington, D.C.

"[Those are] three great, different stories," head coach Bill Tierney said. "[Evan] is a walk-on and a wonderful kid. Kovler was a big-time recruit, a kid who everyone wanted. Brendan, like he plays, is a very understated yet solid foundation of our team, so it's interesting."

That all three live on the same street is less surprising when one takes into account the high concentration of excellent lacrosse played in Washington and the surrounding areas. For example, Kovler played with Reilly in high school and against 15 of his current teammates.

Most of the reason for this is historical. Much as water polo has traditionally been popular on the West Coast, lacrosse has always been an East Coast sport and is only now slowly expanding across the country.

"In the professional leagues, the teams that do really well, in terms of revenue, happen to be the teams on the West Coast — San Francisco, San Diego," Kovler said. Denver's getting really, really good at lacrosse, and the Midwest is too. I think it's just springing up, and within the next 10 years, it won't be this feeling of just East Coast — New York, D.C., Baltimore."

Currently, the Tigers have Illinois, California, Montana and Texas represented on the team in addition to the many players from the lacrosse hotbeds on the east coast.

The lacrosse team is especially open to finding talent across the country due to its high academic standards.

"We've got kids from all over the place," Tierney said. "[There are] two reasons: One, academically, we have to look farther and wider than some of these other guys. Two, I'm a real believer that if you just look in the hotbeds, you are going to overlook some of those great athletes [from] other places."

One area tapped with extreme frequency is the numerous private schools on the East Coast, which helps to give lacrosse the stereotype of being a preppy, East Coast sport. The dominance of prep school students on the Tigers' roster is easily explained as an academic phenomenon.

"The other thing that happens with us is Princeton-oriented. One of the reasons we are able to compete for national championship is because lacrosse is a prep school sport. Because we are getting kids from the private schools on Long Island, the private schools in Baltimore, it just makes a lot of sense. Those schools make sense for Princeton. Luckily for us, it makes sense for [the lacrosse team] as well."

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Kovler disagrees with the portrait of lacrosse as a prep school sport. While Kovler attended the Landon School, sophomore teammate Tommy Davis — a native of New York — attended a large public school.

Reilly and Magruder also attended private schools — Landon and St. Albans, respectively — but Kovler attributes this to the overwhelming dominance of private schools in the area.

"It's a difference of where you live," Kovler said. "It's more based around the culture of where people go to school where you live, rather than the culture of lacrosse just being a private school sport."

Magruder agrees with Kovler that the sport gets stereotyped as an institution of East Coast establishment. It is easy to see that its "bad reputation" is undeserved, however, if the sport is inspected more closely.

"If you look at the boys on our lacrosse team, you might not see so much geographic diversity, though we have players from the West Coast as well as the East Coast," Magruder said. "But you'll definitely see on our team a great degree of socioeconomic diversity. And I think that's a key issue. Lacrosse is not the old white preppy boys any more. The sport's expanding quite a bit, both geographically and among different social classes in the United States. I think that's a good thing for the sport."