High school lacrosse is starting to have an L.A. moment. Here’s why

View Park lacrosse players Ayomide Aborisade, left, and Eve Hart have some fun on the practice field.

(Luca Evans / Los Angeles Times)

On a tiny patch of turf on Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools’ home campus, a group of six combined View Park girls and boys giggled as they tried to knock the ball out of one another’s sticks in a Thursday practice.

They shot on a tiny net, because their only full-size one — lent by a now-graduated Pacific Palisades player — was broken. The sticks in their hands were either left over by an old camp run by youth nonprofit Harlem Lacrosse or bought via aggressive Facebook Marketplace maneuvering by coach Elizabeth Waterman.

“The aspect of funding,” first-year coach Waterman said, “has been difficult.”

It is a microcosm of the promise and obstacles high school lacrosse programs face in Los Angeles. Individual sticks can cost up to $150, gloves $200, helmets up to $300 — an “expensive start-up,” as Borrell put it.

The City Section, which covers more teams from underfunded areas, has just 12 schools that field a lacrosse team. The class disparity has corresponded to a racial disparity at the collegiate level. Despite modest improvement during the last decade, 83% of women’s and men’s lacrosse teams in 2022 were white.

“If you go around saying you play lacrosse, you got people saying, ‘Oh, that’s that white people s—,’” said Ayomide Aborisade, a member of the View Park girls’ lacrosse team.

Youth programs like Harlem Lacrosse, which has made roots at Compton High, are key to the growth of the game in lower-income communities, coaches said. View Park has forfeited every game on its schedule this season, not fielding enough students to play. But more will come after the school’s rugby season finishes, Waterman hopes, and the sport’s effect on a joyous bunch Thursday was clear.

“I think it’s a pretty unique sport,” Aborisade said. “We also want to make it more known, for not just white kids, for Black kids.”