A Toast to the Spouses of Lacrosse Coaches

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth: lacrosse is a selfish game. At least, the way we love it. It doesn’t just demand our attention—it consumes it, chews it up, and spits out the scraps. We fall into it headfirst, willingly, obsessively. And if we’re being honest, we often drag the people we love along for the ride.

So to the spouses of lacrosse coaches—the patient ones, the understanding ones, the ones who endure our thousand-yard stares into the existential abyss of whether we should run a 3-3 or a 1-4-1 on extra man—I raise a glass to you.

Because when the season begins, we’re gone.

Not physically, not entirely. Our bodies may still sit across the dinner table, but our minds? They’re somewhere else. Locked in a film session, rewinding and replaying a botched fast break that no one else but us will remember. Calculating how to stretch our budget just enough to buy new uniforms without sacrificing balls, cones, or the half-decent backup goalie who still doesn’t know how to track a shot.

We obsess. Over everything.

Where will our best short-stick defensive midfielder fit in the rotation? Should we shift the ride to something more aggressive? Who’s ready to lead? Who isn’t? We lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, running man-down schemes through our heads like a conspiracy theorist staring at a wall of string-tied newspaper clippings.

And you, the ones who love us, you put up with it.

You put up with our blank stares when you ask us a simple question and we respond with an answer completely unrelated to anything you just said. You endure the late nights of us hunched over a whiteboard, diagramming plays that may or may not ever see the light of day. You accept—sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes with an eye-roll and a knowing smirk—that the first time we held a lacrosse stick, something in us changed forever.

This game isn’t just a pastime. It isn’t just a job. It’s an affair that started long before you met us. And if you’re still here, if you’re still standing by us after all these years, then you understand that it’s part of the deal.

A package deal.

Lacrosse is ancient. Older than the country we live in. Older than the very concept of “coaching” itself. It was played for honor, for battle, for gods. And we? We’re just custodians of something greater than ourselves, trying to pass it down, trying to get it right. And that’s the thing—you don’t just dabble in coaching. You don’t just show up and wing it. You become possessed by it.

Because we’re not just out here for the wins, for the trophies, for the highlight reels. We’re in it for something deeper. We want to build something. To create something. To take a group of kids and, somehow, through hours of drills, speeches, and moments of absolute frustration, mold them into something greater than the sum of their parts. We want to teach them the game that shaped us.

And we want to do it right.

So we disappear. Mentally. Spiritually. Sometimes even physically. We leave before sunrise for practices, stay late after games, go on road trips where we come back exhausted but still spend the next two days talking about everything that went wrong.

And then there’s the tinkering.

The stick doctoring. The ritual of restringing. The trance-like state we enter when we sit down with a new head, fresh mesh, and a vague feeling that the pocket could be better, could be just right if we tweak it one more time. Even though we don’t play anymore, even though that stick will never see a real game, we still do it. Because it’s part of us.

And that’s where you, the spouses, the significant others, come in.

You let us be who we are.

You don’t demand we stop. You don’t force us to “snap out of it.” You see our eyes glaze over mid-conversation and instead of getting angry, you shake your head, sigh, and say, “Lacrosse, huh?” as if that explains everything.

Because it does.

You remind us to eat when we’ve forgotten to. You nudge us back to reality when we’ve spent too long in the clouds. You hold things together when we’re too busy obsessing over a practice plan to notice the sink is leaking. You put up with our unshakable belief that this, this year, will be the year where it all comes together perfectly—even though you’ve heard it all before.

And for that, we owe you.

We owe you for the patience, the tolerance, the ability to roll with the madness year after year. We owe you for dealing with the weekends sacrificed to tournaments, the late-night film sessions, the rants about referees that are delivered with the fervor of a man testifying before Congress.

We owe you for understanding that this is part of what makes us whole.

So thank you. For sticking around. For letting us love this ridiculous, beautiful, maddening game the way we do. For being there when we finally come back to earth.

Eventually.

Probably.