There is a principle in sociology that effective groups can be no more than 150 people.  If your company rises above 150 employees, you start to see a drop-off in overall efficiency.  Nomadic social groups of pre-history seem to have been about that size.  In effect, 150 people is about the maximum number of people that anyone can have any sort of meaningful relationship with.

Fortunately for you, LacrosseReference’s loyal reader count hasn’t quite hit up against this ceiling.  (One day…sigh.)  That means that when readers have feedback, we listen.  When they have suggestions worth implementing, we implement.  And that is the case that we have before us folks.

Consider this post 2A in a series of posts on the topic of geography and talent distribution in lacrosse:

1. Stocking Utah’s Pond
2. Lacrosse Talent is Heading West (and South)
3. Lacrosse Talent is Heading West (Canadian Edition)
4. The best D1 lacrosse players choose schools farther from their hometowns

One of our readers on reddit pointed out a sad fact:

“too bad they didn’t include Canadian content.”

It was too bad. But rest assured, there was no malice, no slight involved in the exclusion of Canadian provinces from our snazzy colored maps.  I just didn’t have the requisite D3 .json file that allows me to create that specific map.  So I went out and found it.  Canadian fans of Lacrosse Reference, today is your day…

Can’t escape Canada

In all seriousness, a geographic analysis of hometowns in D1 lacrosse really isn’t complete without including Canadian lacrosse talent as well.  The impact of our northerly neighbors on the game is unarguable, both in terms of players and style.  So I appreciate the reader-delivered push to update this analysis to include Canada. (Note: the original analysis did include Canadians in the map that showed how far each school is from the talent base.  It was just the coordinate-based map that was U.S. only.)

And in fact, putting the Canadian lens over top of this data did highlight some surprising differences compared to the US-only views.  Let’s start with a baseline.  The map below shows the production distribution for this past season.  I explain the methodology in more detail in the previous article.  But basically: the red dots represent an area of the country that generates a lot of players and productivity.  The total productivity of an area decreases as the dots move from red to purple to blue to grey.

The main similarity between the U.S. and Canada is that there are clearly areas that we’d call hotbeds.  The red-dot areas in the Canadian view produce similar on-field production as the top areas in the U.S.  The main difference is that the blue dot areas in Canada produce about a quarter of the production of the average blue dot areas in the U.S.

In other words, at the very top, a Canadian hotbed is going to be about as fertile as a U.S. hotbed.  Toronto and Vancouver are not far off the pace of Long Island or Baltimore.  But the talent tail in the U.S. is much longer.

In some ways, this would make Canada an easier place to recruit.  There is enough talent in some minor cities in the U.S. that you could imagine a competitive advantage from targeting those areas.  In Canada, spending resources to recruit Manitoba probably isn’t going to be much of an advantage.  You can cover 99% of Canadian production to date by visiting 4 metropolitan areas.

(How often do you get to see a map of Canada without the U.S. underneath?  I guess this is what Canadians are used to.)

Where is the talent shift?

Where the analyses diverge is when you look at the trends.  In the U.S. map, you’ll remember a pretty significant increase in the production coming from newer hotbeds like Southern California and San Francisco.  In Canada, we don’t see that.

The map below is the same distribution as above, but for the 2014 season.

Notice anything?  It looks almost exactly like the map of 2017, right down to the shade of red/blue in the individual geographies.  Basically, where the U.S. has new rising hotbeds, Canada just has…hotbeds.  The areas that sent the most production to D1 rosters in 2014 are the same areas doing it in 2017.

Where are the rising Canadian lacrosse hotbeds?

I am wholly unqualified to answer this question.  I’ve been to Toronto one time, for a work meeting.  Didn’t even have a chance to stay the night.  So any Canadians that want to share their opinions, just email me, and I’ll update this article with any reasonable discourse.  Honestly, please help me and my U.S. compatriots understand what is happening here.

I was going to share some theories of my own.  As I started writing down some thoughts, I realized that I would just sound like an idiot.  Do little kids play soccer in Canada like they do in the U.S.?  I was going to talk about maybe there is less field space that can be used for youth lacrosse.  Who knows, maybe kids do play soccer up there like they do here?  Since I don’t even have basic facts as my disposal, I’ll forego wild speculation for once.

So again with the plea: if you have any thoughts about the lack of trend here, let me know and I’ll publish them.

Thanks again to our Reddit reader for keeping us on our toes.  Take this article as proof that Lacrosse Reference is very attuned to the feedback of our readers.  Keep ’em coming.

Update!!! Some Canadians have weighed in

One reader offered up a few points pertaining specifically to Ontario lacrosse.  One of the points that they made which I hadn’t necessarily considered was how much more popular box lacrosse is vs field lacrosse in Canada.  In other words, even if field lacrosse was growing, it’s working from a smaller base, so we may not even notice the change.

But, they also made a second point which was surprising and quite the opposite of the American landscape.

In regards to popularity, Lacrosse has significantly diminished in popularity the last couple years. Reasons include summer hockey (uggh!), growing interest in Baseball (when Blue Jays were doing well), and the lack of visibility since NLL is no longer nationally televised, and neither is NCAA lax… For example Whitby has the largest box house league (in the world likely) but is only 400 players this summer, last year it was 900, the year before 1100 I believe…

So Lacrosse is not very popular (many public schools don’t teach it in phys-ed, and high-school teams aren’t a big deal, its the rep league where the best minors play), but likely just as in the US, the players are enthusiastic! Hockey being so popular here, and lacrosse having so many similarities with hockey definitely attracts a lot of hockey players to Lax for the summer, it’s rare to find a minor lax player that isn’t in the same arenas all winter playing hockey…

In a nutshell, lacrosse in Canada (at least in Ontario) is not growing in popularity (at least in the view of our reader).  And to top things off, a most unlikely challenger has emerged: baseball!

I remember being obsessed with the Orioles growing up and I still have my Cal Ripken jersey hanging in the closet.  My brother and I spent months of our lives playing wiffle ball.  But moving from early childhood to early adulthood, the energy of lacrosse caught my attention.  And now, you can’t talk baseball for more than a few minutes it seems without someone talking about how bored they are by it.

So to hear that lacrosse is losing popularity to baseball among other things was quite a surprise.

We had another reader share some comments via Twitter:

This is fantastic content. In terms of Canadian growth, I would suggest that the relatively tiny population makes it harder…

— Adam Dickson (@MapleDickson43) July 26, 2017

…for a new hotbed to develop and takes longer to produce D1 level talent that would appear on this map. However, it would be interesting..

— Adam Dickson (@MapleDickson43) July 26, 2017

…to see these maps including DII and DIII data. I think you would see many more emerging hotbeds

— Adam Dickson (@MapleDickson43) July 26, 2017

In some ways, these two points of view contradict each other.  Lacrosse can’t be growing and losing popularity in Ontario at the same time.

But dig a little deeper and I think there is a unifying theme.  If we assume that field lacrosse is dominated by box in the national psyche, then you’d agree that general level of interest would only be enough to support so many top flight programs at the junior level.  That would explain why 4 metro areas are producing all of the production from Canadian players.

But Adam is right to point out that our analysis, by definition, only included those players that made it all the way to a D1 program and even then, they would need to have contributed at least one play to be included.  If field lacrosse is growing from a small base relative to box, then it’s entirely plausible that it won’t show up in this type of analysis for another 5 or 10 years.

I’ll reiterate, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.  But I am grateful for our readers providing their opinions.  If you have other thoughts, feel free to send them along.

More data maps!!!

2014

2015

2016

2017