You still have
the stick
Men's lacrosse in Jacksonville is one club team, and they are legitimately good, but a club means a roster and a season. I want the version you show up to when you are free. Nobody is running that, so I am building a list.
The deal
Men's pickup lacrosse in Jacksonville
Nothing is decided
I have not picked a name or a field or a night, and I am not going to until I know who is in. Where people live and when they are free decide all three.
You do not have to be good
Four years of D1 or one season of JV you mostly spent on the sideline, does not matter. There are no tryouts and nobody is keeping stats. I am going to be visibly out of shape and I have made peace with it.
Help me run it
I am not trying to be the commissioner of anything. If you want a hand in sorting out fields and gear and who brings the pinnies, check the box on the form and I will call you.
The list
Get on the list
Twenty men with jobs and kids can never agree on an hour, which is what kills most adult pickup groups before they ever play a game. So the form asks you to paint the hours you could actually make, and I will do the math on where everybody overlaps. If Thursday at seven turns out to be the answer, Thursday at seven it is.
Who is asking
I was the worst middie on the team
There were four strings of midfielders at Episcopal and I was the only guy on the fourth. I could not run, I got winded fast, and I was bigger than everybody around me, which is a rough set of traits at a position that is mostly running in circles until your lungs give out. I played midfield because I asked to. I was fourteen and I wanted to score goals like every other fourteen year old.
Then my family moved and I landed at Charlotte Latin, where they had just hired a coach named Dick Sipperly. A real one. First week of practice, stick skills still terrible, we get into a scrimmage and I slide on somebody and absolutely light him up. Clean hit. Just all of my weight arriving at once in a way nobody expected from the new kid.
Turned out he was one of Sipperly's starters. Sipperly came over, a little bit pissed, and told me three things in order:
- That was a great hit.
- Please do not do that to my starters in practice.
- Go home and do not come back until your parents buy you a long stick, because you play defense now.
Everything that made me a bad midfielder made me a decent defenseman. Being big finally counted for something. Being slow stopped mattering, because defense is angles and timing and knowing where a guy wants to go before he goes there. And it turned out I liked hitting people considerably more than I liked shooting, which I probably should have worked out on my own.
All-State two years later, with a pole in my hands
A lot of guys around here have some version of that story. You play, you graduate, you move somewhere for a job, and the stick ends up in the garage behind the Christmas decorations for fifteen years. Mine included.
There is a club here, the Armadillos, and they are the real deal. They won the Florida Lacrosse League Masters division in 2026, which is a genuine accomplishment against Tampa and Orlando and everybody else in the state. I asked to join their Facebook group a while back and never heard anything, and honestly a full season is more than I can sign up for right now anyway.
So I am after something smaller. A run you can show up to when you are free and skip when you are not, without letting anybody down.
I have not picked a name or a field and I do not have a plan past this page. The form asks when you could show up, since I cannot pick a night without knowing that. If you want to help me figure out the rest, there is a box for that too.
Questions
Questions you probably have
Does this league exist yet
No. Nothing has been decided, including the name. Right now it is a list of people who miss playing, and once there are enough of us to field a real run, we pick a night and a field and go.
How good do I have to be
It does not matter, because there are no tryouts and nobody is keeping stats. The only thing that would wreck this is twenty guys who all want to play attack.
What does it cost
Nothing to get on the list. If we end up renting a field or buying a couple of goals, we split it, which is why the form asks whether you would chip in. Plenty of public fields are free, in which case so is this.
What gear do I need
A stick, gloves, and a helmet at minimum if we are playing with contact. Full pads or no pads gets decided by whoever actually shows up, not by me.
When does it start
When there are enough people. Roughly twenty committed players makes a real run possible, and you will know as soon as I do.
Where will you play
Undecided, and it depends on where people are driving from, which is why the form asks for your zip code. Public parks are the cheapest option and school fields need a permit, so it will probably come down to whichever one has an open evening.