One of the country’s most popular, fastest-growing girls’ sports is nearing a move that might seem obvious to outsiders but has instead engendered rigorous debate: offering players protective headgear.
While boys’ lacrosse players have been required to wear hard-shell helmets for years, in the girls’ game, which is played by vastly different rules that generally forbid contact, only goalies are obligated to wear helmets.
But with girls’ lacrosse players wielding reinforced sticks and firing 60-mile-per-hour shots with a hard, unyielding ball, serious head injuries do occur. In a climate of heightened awareness about head trauma in athletics and with a substantial rate of concussions in girls’ lacrosse documented by recent studies, the push for some kind of headgear in the sport has gained traction.