PLL, trying to grow the game of lacrosse in other cities, is not visiting Long Island for first time in five years
Liam Entenmann of the New York Atlas plays the ball in the third quarter during a PLL semifinal against the Maryland Whipsnakes on Sept. 7, 2024, at Hofstra Credit: Bob Sorensen
Everyone knows how important Long Island is to the game of lacrosse. The Island is one of the sport’s biggest hotbeds, and players from Long Island appear on the rosters of just about every college program in the country.
Long Islanders also feature very prominently in the Premier Lacrosse League, the sport’s professional outdoor league, with players from Nassau and Suffolk making up about 18% of the league’s 200 players, the highest share of players hailing from any single region, ahead of Canada, New Jersey and Maryland.
None of those players will be getting a homecoming weekend this season, however, as, for the first time in five years, the PLL isn’t visiting Long Island this summer.
“Yeah, it's definitely a bit disappointing,’’ New York Atlas goalie Liam Entenmann, a Point Lookout native and Chaminade High School grad, said Friday night at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Conn., the closest the league will get to Long Island during the 10-game regular season. “But this [Fairfield] is a nice little in-between. I drove up from Long Island yesterday, so that was pretty cool, and not a bad drive.’’
“There were a lot of Long Island people that made the trip today,’’ said Joe Spallina, the coach of the women’s lacrosse team at Stony Brook, and the first-year general manager of the PLL’s California Redwoods. “I took the ferry to get here. It was very, very convenient.’’
Usually, the eight-team league, which operates as a touring model, where its teams go to a different location each summer weekend, will make a stop on Long Island, either during the regular season or the playoffs. The league hosted regular season weekends at Shuart Stadium at Hofstra in 2021 and 2022 and hosted its semifinals there each of the last two seasons.
But this year the league moved its semifinals on Sept. 1 to Philadelphia, which hosted the championship game each of the last three seasons. The championship game, on Sept. 14, will take place at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey, home of Major League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls.
According to PLL co-founder Mike Rabil, the league’s decision to bypass Long Island this year was all about trying out some less traditional markets this year.
“We love Long Island,’’ Rabil told Newsday at Fairfield last weekend. “It's a great place for us. [But] our league is trying to grow the game, so we go to places where there's not often as deep-rooted of a lacrosse community. Chicago [where the league went for the July 11-12 weekend] is one of those places … We're bringing our quarterfinals to Minneapolis, which we're really excited about. In our model, it's really about exploring different markets, figuring out future potential homes.’’
Last year, the league assigned teams to home regions for the first time, a move it said would open the possibility of teams working to get local sponsorship opportunities and do things in local communities, like youth camps.
Another thing putting teams in individual markets does is lay the groundwork for potential future expansion. With eight teams, the league currently plays four games over a regular season weekend, and expanding would mean more games, which the league is concerned might be too much for a single venue over one weekend.
So, if the PLL is going to expand, it may need to modify its touring model and perhaps consider the more traditional pro sports model where teams are anchored to a city and play home and away games. That’s where testing out markets such as Chicago and Minneapolis comes in.
Spallina, for one, is confident that 2025 will prove to be just a blip, and the PLL will be back on Long Island before too long.
“Lacrosse is a huge part of what Long Island is,’’ said Spallina, who at one time coached the New York Lizards of the PLL’s predecessor, Major League Lacrosse. “I think this year, not having [the PLL] will make people even more anxious to get it next year.’’
And according to Rabil, that could absolutely happen.
“Right now, we're at that place where we're growing, and there's demand, and we… needed to check out different markets,’’ Rabil said. “So, we’re considering [Long Island] coming back in the future, obviously. It's an important place, as a lot of our best players are from there.’’
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
