TopOfTheCircle.com

Serving the scholastic field hockey and lacrosse community since 1998

Archive for May 24, 2023

May 24, 2023 — Might Athletes Unlimited morph into a more typical North American naming convention?

For giggles, I took a survey on the Athletes Unlimited website a few days ago.

One of the lines of questioning was interesting. It involved whether or not fans of AU identified with a single favorite player, or the color of the uniform, or the captain of a particular team over the course of a weekend.

During the first couple of years of AU women’s lacrosse, I didn’t identify teams by the captain (Team Cummings, Team Moreno, Team Apuzzo, etc.). Instead, I gave them my own mental nicknames — Purple Reign, Orange Crush, Goldenrods, and the Sky Blues.

Those names fly in the face of most sports, which identify with a territorial designation — a neighborhood (Chelsea F.C.), a city (Boston Celtics), a region (Hampton Roads Admirals), or even an entire state (Utah Royals). Now, we’ve been hearing that Premier League Lacrosse — a men’s summer lacrosse league which travels all over the U.S. — is going to give its heretofore vagabond teams an actual city name.

I wouldn’t mind Athletes Unlimited doing the same, albeit there are doing to have to be more than four teams in each of the leagues in order to accomplish this.