By Kalle Oakes,Staff Writer

AUBURN – It’s considered the fastest-growing youth sport in the country, and the numbers show that lacrosse in Maine is keeping up with its city cousins.

Since the first club teams laced up their cleats and cracked out their sticks in 1988, lacrosse has evolved from a curiosity to a trend. More than 70 boys’ and girls’ teams will play the rugged Native American game this season. That number has nearly doubled in the last seven years.

You can bet there are a thousand stories about what it took to get lacrosse off the turf and running ’round these parts, but you’re unlikely to encounter a team that worked harder to gain a foothold than the Edward Little High School girls.

Three years of scurrying to raise start-up costs, recruit players, coax volunteer coaches and unearth opponents have paid off with a full-fledged, Eastern Maine varsity schedule this season.

“The girls did a great job getting this team going,” said first-year coach Jim Platz. “From the start, the funding for the team was provided completely by the girls, and it still is.”

Never mind that EL lacrosse barely had a feeder system when a small group of devotees decided to introduce the relatively foreign game in 2002. Then, the few students who had played the game filtered through the Lewiston Recreation Department and lost many of their teammates when Lewiston High School launched its lacrosse program.

In addition to perfecting their own skills in a game that requires so much coordination, footwork and quickness, potential cornerstones of the fledgling program needed to pound the pavement when they weren’t rehearsing the catch-and-shoot.

Need uniforms? Somebody better bake some brownies.

Not enough players? Keep your eyes open in phys-ed class for new blood. Can’t find coaches? Time to work the phones.

Platz, himself, answered somewhat of a casting call.

“They needed a coach and I made myself available,” Platz said. “This is my first year, so I really don’t know what kind of competition they faced last year. It’s the first time I’ve seen most of the KVAC teams.”

That unfamiliarity hasn’t hurt so far.

The Red Eddies won their first official league game, clipping Camden Hills, before dropping to the .500 mark with a loss at Morse. They’re scheduled to meet Mountain Valley in Rumford today at 3 p.m.

“We went into the Camden Hills game thinking it would be a pretty even matchup, and we wound up winning by a couple of goals,” Platz said. “Our second game was the opposite situation. I hear Morse is one of the teams that has been playing for a quite a while, and they got us.”

EL school policy requires any club team to play three full seasons before petitioning the school board for varsity status.

The Red Eddies launched the girls’ program one year before the boys, who are in the final year of their club trial. Both teams play their home games at Central Maine Technical College. In the girls’ camp, numbers aren’t staggering, but they’re encouraging. Twenty players comprise the inaugural varsity roster. “We have a lot of the same group from last year, plus some new players,” Platz said. “It’s pretty evenly divided among the four classes, which is what you need to keep it strong. We could use more players to build the program.”

The co-captains are Dani Martineau, a senior and veteran of the field hockey program, and Beth Esponnette, a junior who played midfield in soccer.

Those are natural progressions. Lacrosse incorporates many of the skills showcased in soccer and field hockey but is arguably faster paced than both games.

In an April 25 feature about the youth lacrosse phenomenon, Sports Illustrated acknowledged that two reasons for the game’s popularity are a lack of parental pressure (older folks don’t give advice because they don’t understand the game) and the fact that coaches encourage players to try other sports to hone their hand-eye coordination and physical strength rather than urging them to specialize.

At EL, the players’ ownership in the program might be the primary reason for its growth spurt. “They didn’t get any money from the athletic department to get it running,” Platz said. “They did all the bake sales, all the fund-raising, made all the phone calls, soliciting. It took the work of a lot of generous people. They had to do everything.”