April 3, 2008
Metro Lacrosse makes inroads
by Bill Keefe/
It could have been jai alai, for all she knew.
Christine Higgins remembers sitting in gym class as a sophomore at Boston Latin Academy when a group made a presentation using sticks with nets on the end, throwing a ball back and forth.
The South Boston native had always played basketball, but there was something to this.
Higgins and a bunch of other girls who had never seen lacrosse joined Metro Lacrosse’s girls high school program. They were given sticks and goggles. They were shown how to hold the stick and how to catch and throw.
“I don’t think I caught one ball that whole first season,” Higgins says. “And we got killed. But it was fun because no one knew how to play. We all kind of learned together.”
Halfway through the season, the team still hadn’t scored.
“When we got that first goal that year, you would think we won the World Series,” Higgins says. “Everyone was going crazy.”
The team progressed and so did Higgins, who liked the sport so much and did so well that she eventually played lacrosse — not basketball, as she envisioned — at Salve Regina University. During her time there, Higgins stayed involved with Metro, working as a counselor at summer camps. When she graduated last May, Higgins “came back to where she came from” to work for Metro full time as an assistant program manager.
When she thinks back to that first season, dropping balls and losing games, she remembers the concern and devotion of the people involved making it fun.
“The coaches and people that worked at Metro Lacrosse were amazing, they were so awesome,” Higgins says. “They would bend over backward and do anything for you. They were so encouraging. Even when we were not winning, they would always tell you you were doing an awesome job and they liked having us around.”
Higgins personifies what the nonprofit Metro Lacrosse, founded in 2000 and headquartered in Dorchester, is all about. Through its no-cost, year-round lacrosse programs for inner-city youth, Metro instills character education, teaches life lessons, introduces participants to educational opportunities and opens career and networking doors in the lacrosse community.
At the center of the Metro program is the R.E.S.P.E.C.T. curriculum, which stands for responsibility, effort, sportsmanship, participation, enthusiasm, community and teamwork. Players’ adherence and success to that tenet is a requirement to continued opportunity to play, to serve as a counselor-in-training, to make school presentations as a teen ambassador, to work at a summer camp or to receive SAT and college counseling.
“Metro Lacrosse is using the team sport environment to cultivate leaders and individuals who understand how to use things learned in a team environment to other areas of their life,” says CEO and executive director Emily Helm, who started with the organization as a volunteer coach and became a staff member in 2004 before being named to her current position in June of 2007.
Metro raises $1.5 million a year, with major sponsorship from the New Balance Foundation and support from equipment companies Warrior and Cascade, to operate teams in Allston/Brighton, Chelsea, East Boston, East Cambridge, Dorchester, Hyde Park, Mattapan and Roxbury for more than 500 boys and girls in third grade through high school.
Metro has a full-time staff of 12, and 10 times as many volunteers — mostly coaches, but also educational counselors. Then there’s Adrian Del Maestro, who must qualify as both. He’s in his third year of mostly coaching fifth- and sixth-graders while pursuing a Ph.D. in physics at Harvard.
Del Maestro grew up playing lacrosse through high school in the Canadian city of London, Ontario. At Harvard, he wanted to get involved again and found Metro. He coached the same night he called and inquired.
“The curriculum is about more than lacrosse,” Del Maestro says. “Some kids are from rough-and-tumble areas and don’t have the parental support. They’re not used to having people that interested in what they do.
“To be honest, I think I have more fun than they do. It’s a fair time commitment, but out there it goes really fast. I like all my co-coaches and the people at Metro. It’s the funnest thing I do all weekend.”
Metro was founded by then-Harvard Law student Zack Lehman, who had played lacrosse and football at Dartmouth. Lehman started by establishing a youth league in Charlestown, then branched out. In January, Lehman was honored by U.S. Lacrosse with a Youth Excellence Award. In 2006, Lehman moved to Bethel, Maine, to work as the assistant head of school and boys varsity lacrosse coach at Gould Academy. But Metro remains a part of him — he brought Gould to Chelsea High for Metro’s tournament at the end of March.
Lehman approached Matt Dwyer, Boston Cannons president and principal of the ownership group, to serve on Metro’s original board of directors.
“Once I understood what his mission was,” says Dwyer, “and how dedicated he was to it in terms of serving the under-served kids of Boston and using lacrosse as the medium for them to learn life skills from it, it was just a natural fit to make Metro Lacrosse the official charity of the Cannons.”
Dwyer is currently chairman of the Metro board. Cannons players are involved in clinics and camps, the team donates tickets to every home game, and by its promotion of Metro, the Cannons lend an important endorsement.
In just a short time, Metro Lacrosse has instilled a love of lacrosse to a whole segment of youth that had limited exposure to it. And, at the same time, it has exposed them to something a whole lot bigger.
Says 18-year-old Dorchester resident Mark O’Donnell, a Metro player since fifth grade: “What keeps kids coming back is a sense of community and the ability to make friends.”
