lax culture from an insider

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05/21/2010 07:38

Subject: lax culture from an insider

quote

Anonymous

This is from a sports website and i think is REALLY interesting:
see: http://www.sbnation.com/2010/5/6/1459030/george-huguely-yeardley-love-uva-lacrosse-murder

CONDEMNING THE CULTURE I went to a school exactly like Landon, and most of my best friends played lacrosse in high school. Most of those that played in high school also continued to play in college. And while my friends were pretty normal and benign, it put me in close proximity with others from the sport that weren't so awesome.

Ultimately, in my experience, this meant hanging out with a lot of guys—friends of friends, I guess—that partied really hard, and treated a lot of people like crap. Girls, non-athletes, authority figures... Pretty much anyone that wasn't one of them either didn't exist, or existed solely as an object of ridicule. Personally, I was somewhere in between, partying as hard as them and rebelling against rules and authority, but (hopefully) stopping short of ever treating anyone like crap.

(Who was I to make fun of anyone? In high school, I played tennis and wrote a blog.)

But some of the others, well... They played lacrosse. In the environment outlined above, that meant something. They were the best athletes in arguably the most important high school sport in the D.C. area. While normal people were sweating out a brutal college application process, these guys were going to college on scholarships, committing to great schools like UVA, Princeton, and Georgetown before the process even began. It seems absurd now, but to a lot of people, those guys seemed to have it all, and they knew it. Because ... (gasp) ... they played lacrosse.

But we'll put aside the big-fish-small-pond dynamic that some of these guys embodied, because the implications for that psychology are more important to this discussion. Again, this is just my experience. But basically, from what I saw, "the guys that played lacrosse" surrounded themselves mostly with people who thought that was really awesome, which meant they could get away with a lot of behavior that'd otherwise be considered pretty reprehensible. No different than athletes from other sports, except that lacrosse draws from a smaller, much wealthier pool of talent.

The corollary to the economic aspect is that many lax stars grow up spoiled, and entitlement becomes a problem much earlier than it does with most basketball or football stars.

By the time college arrives, the "spoils" of the lifestyle have gotten more decadent than just the elevated social status many of them enjoyed in high school. Drugs and alcohol, minimal consequences, preferable treatment from coaches and academic advisors, and the so-called "lacrosstitutes," groupies entranced by the glamor of it all. It's by no means universal to every lacrosse player or every lacrosse program, but in the lacrosse social scene, it's all there. And of course, there's that homogeneous social circle, normalizing this behavior every step of the way.
It's still a small sport, after all. For elite lacrosse players, there are only a handful of elite college programs to choose from, and most of the rosters at those schools include kids from the same elite prep schools they played against in high school. When they get to college, the team functions as a built-in social circle, and often times, it looks a lot like the one they had in high school, only with less rules. What does this mean?

For normal students, going to college is an exercise in broadening perspectives. For lacrosse players, it can often be an exercise in confirming perspectives and values that have been skewed since early in high school. That's a problem.

You might say these are generalizations, but again, I'm only speaking from what I've seen. You don't have to acknowledge my anecdotal evidence as anything more than just that. But keep in mind, I grew up in the same area as Huguely, with many of the same friends, congregating in many of the same places.

And as far as Yeardley Love's death is concerned, this much is fact: George Huguely was an elite lacrosse player that went to an elite prep school, and graduated to join an elite lacrosse program at UVA. If we're to diagnose how and why this happened, those facts bear some relevance.

Nobody's blaming the sport of lacrosse for the murder of Yeardley Love, just as it would have been ridiculous to blame college basketball for what happened at Baylor in 2003, when Carlos Dotson murdered his teammate, Patrick Dennehy. Like the Baylor situation, this was a senseless tragedy that transcends college athletics or even everyday crime. It's the sort of thing that makes us question life and justice, in general.
That's not lacrosse's fault.

But if we're looking to understand this tragedy in a way that teaches us anything, lacrosse matters. It's part of the conversation. Given the evidence, George Huguely was clearly a young man with problems. To what extent they were manifested, and how, remains to be seen. Given my relationship to some of his friends, I've heard things, but all that'll trickle out in due time. For now, let's say this: To leave any human being the way he left Yeardley that night requires both deep-seated psychological problems and a severe emotional detachment.

Diagnosing those issues and their source is someone else's job, but having lived vicariously through a number of friends playing Division 1 lacrosse, and having seen the lifestyles firsthand, it's not hard to see how that culture of excess may have exacerbated whatever problems this kid was facing.

George Huguely may not have felt "entitled" to date Yeardley Love regardless of her objections (that conclusion's too easy) but it's entirely conceivable that lacrosse's entitlement culture, filled with excess, enabled him to turn to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism, and without any social repercussions, burying his "issues" deep inside. And make no mistake, whatever happened the night of Huguely's "altercation" with Yeardley Love, some sort of substance abuse contributed to that "emotional detachment" referenced above.

Witnesses have said he'd been seen drinking all day, and don't be surprised if the police report reveals that there were drugs in his system that night. And whatever the case, really, it all points to the same problem, where lacrosse is at least tangentially complicit.