Jack Blommer had not played lacrosse until this year, but he has quickly taken a liking to it.
"My dad is from Minnesota and he was a hockey guy and it's kind of like hockey," said Blommer, 10, from Coal Valley. "It's aggressive, there's contact, so it really pulled me in."
Blommer tried playing ice hockey and dekhockey, but the constant flow of lacrosse provides a different aspect that he finds appealing.
"There's a lot more different things," Blommer said. "Instead of always being on the ground, you can be in the air and move a lot more instead of just sitting there in dekhockey because you have such a big break. In this sport, you can run a lot more."
Blommer's experience is part of a trend, as lacrosse continues to grow in popularity across the country.
According to statistics database Statista, from 2008 to 2018, the total number of participants in lacrosse in the United States grew from 524,230 to 829,423, an increase of 58%.
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Locally, the Quad City Lacrosse Association has also seen growth. Started in 2015 with just 15 kids, the club now has 57 participants on five teams, from 10-and-under to high school.
The club hosted a two-day tournament this weekend at the St. Vincent Center Athletic Complex in Davenport, featuring nine clubs from around Iowa and Illinois. Hundreds of spectators lined the stands throughout the games, showing the increased interest in the sport that historically has been prominent on the east coast.
"It's a very active game. When kids get out and play games, they kind of get hooked. It's a very fast-paced game, it's growing nationwide," said Vince McGee, president of the Quad City Lacrosse Association. "I think a lot of it now is it's on TV, it's on ESPN so people in this part of the country who were not exposed to it at all can now see it."
McGee has been president of the club since 2016, but didn't have a background in lacrosse when he and his family moved to the area seven years ago. His daughter, Kenna, took an interest in playing the sport, but with no local organization at the time, they had to drive to Dubuque in order to play.
"A few months later, I was contacted by a guy who had tried to start a club here the previous year," McGee said. "He brought everyone together who had an interest in lacrosse in the area and the team was kind of born from that in 2015."
McGee said the club has tried to keep things affordable for families, with yearly fees of $180, and the club offers the option to rent equipment for $80.
Last year, the club had enough numbers to form a high school team, and has seen two members continue their careers in college, with Muscatine's Hannah Reynolds enrolled at St. Ambrose and Davenport Central's Eamon Garton intending to play at Cornell College next season.
The club has seven coaches total, all certified through U.S. Lacrosse, including high school coach Brad Brown.
Like McKee, Brown had little knowledge of lacrosse until his son, Zach, started playing in sixth grade. A retiring Army captain of nearly 21 years, Brown moved to the Quad-Cities from Washington last July, and this season took the reins of the Quad City River Raiders, the club's high school team.
"I started dipping into the books and learning the sport," Brown said. "I understand strategy, of course, the military has taught me a lot about strategy and teamwork, so I think it was an easy transition from being an Army officer and being the leader of teams to coming in and taking everything I've learned from being an Army officer to teaching boys how to play lacrosse."
Heading into this weekend's games, the River Raiders were 4-1-1 under Brown. He is witnessing firsthand the appeal that is driving the sport's growth.
"It's really just a very dynamic sport," Brown said. "Everybody is moving around, doing a lot of things at once, and it's all synchronized chaos. That's really appealing to me, breaking that down. This whole thing might seem confusing for somebody but for a lacrosse player, it makes perfect sense.
"The friendships you build in the lacrosse community are friendships that are going to last a lifetime. ... I say give it a chance because you can really expand your athleticism, understanding a new sport and really, it's a lot of fun."
Lacrosse was sanctioned by the Illinois High School Association in 2018 but has not yet been sanctioned in Iowa.
McGee said the club attended the Iowa athletic directors convention in March to spread awareness, but he thinks the game has to grow even more before Iowa officially adopts the sport in the high school ranks.
"We'd like to see it continue to grow, maybe to the point where we can split off into a couple of clubs," McGee said. "We have a long-range goal, longer than five years, of getting it sanctioned in Iowa, too. I think we've got to continue to grow the game before that becomes a possibility but our intent now was to just let them know, here we are, this game is being played, so when you hear from us again in five or 10 years, it rings a bell."