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Lacrosse is coming to the Olympics in 2028, but it’s not the traditional version of the sport most people in the region are familiar with.
What’s called Sixes Lacrosse is a faster-paced version with fewer players on the field at each time, and with more of a basketball feel to it.
A club-level collegiate league based in Maryland is hoping to get students from HBCUs on some of those Olympic rosters.
The Next Collegiate League is comprised mostly of club-level teams from HBCUs, such as Bowie State, University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, Morgan State and other HBCUs in the mid-Atlantic region. It’s sponsored by Next Level Sports and Entertainment — a small, minority-owned television network.
“Sports is a vehicle to do a lot of different things,” said Liam Banks, the director of field sports at Next Level. “We’re trying to open the doors within our next collegiate league for students, and particularly HBCU students, to remove the barrier for entry and have access to some really cool opportunities.”
One of those opportunities could be a trip to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics.
“I told them … when we first started this league, that players from this league would be competing in the 2028 Olympics,” Banks said. “This past fall, we were down in Jamaica, and we saw Tommy Netterville from Morgan State competing for the Panama national team.”
The teams travel to USA Lacrosse’s headquarters in Sparks, Maryland, which is in Baltimore County, and they usually play two to three games each weekend.
“The reason we started the Next Collegiate League was to really test the Sixes model of lacrosse,” Banks said. “Nobody was doing it. Nobody really understood the rules that were going to be coming forward.”
Banks added, “All these rules that were set up by the IOC were set up with the idea of inclusion, with the idea of bringing in a new market, a new generation of lacrosse players. I’ve seen it on the international level. I’ve traveled to Jamaica to watch PALA (Pan-American Lacrosse Association) Sixes and the sixes discipline of lacrosse evens things out a little bit.”
The Maryland Sports Commission, a quasi-government agency that’s a branch of the Maryland Stadium Authority, is also involved in helping the NCL operate.
“A study that came out in 2019 showed the impact of youth and amateur sports on the U.S. economy, where the youth and amateur sports market was doing $19.8 billion in revenues for the United States,” said Terry Hasseltine, the executive director of the commission. “The NFL is doing $16.3 billion. So when you look at the economic curve in the NFL, being the highest in that curve of professional sports, youth and amateur sports is outranking the economic delivery for the United States at a higher level than our professional leagues.”
He said Maryland spent years not reaching its potential in that regard.
That’s why the state has also worked with Baltimore City to attract and retain the CIAA conference basketball tournaments, featuring Division 2 HBCU’s from the East Coast, including Bowie State University. And Maryland’s now sponsoring programs to get more HBCU students involved in the business side of sports tourism.
“Basically to help students shorten the curve of learning about the sports tourism industry, and being able to be job ready when they come out of college to support the industry and the things that we do,” Hasseltine said. “We’ll take on a student from each campus within our Team Maryland partnership across the entire state and be able to really help elevate and grow opportunities within the sport tourism space, in partnership with our HBCU institutions.”
They also sponsor other programs at the youth level around the state.
“Everything that we’ve done is a building block to help us create a better environment for sports tourism to thrive here in the state of Maryland,” said Hasseltine.
And by starting early, the belief is that it’ll pay off, on and off the field, later on.
“We want people to be able to identify with our players and hopefully inspire them to be the next generation of great athletes,” Banks said. The MSC is “a part of helping support us and help us produce some of that content to ensure that we can bring it to people and show them what a great place Maryland is.”
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