CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Lacrosse: Canada’s National Summer Sport

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Long before Europeans arrived in North America, many Indigenous nations across eastern North America were playing a game with sticks and a ball that would later become known as lacrosse. Among the Haudenosaunee, it is still called the Creator’s Game, and it carried a meaning that went far beyond entertainment. Matches could be held to settle quarrels between communities, to help heal the sick, or to give young men the strength and endurance they would need as hunters and warriors. Early versions had few fixed rules. A team might include hundreds of players, the field could stretch over a great distance, and a single contest sometimes lasted for days.

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French missionaries and settlers who watched the game in the 1600s are generally credited with giving it the name used today. By the mid-1800s, non-Indigenous players in Montreal had taken up the sport, and they sharpened their skills by playing against talented Mohawk teams from nearby communities. In the 1860s, a Montreal dentist named William George Beers wrote down a standard set of rules that helped turn a loosely organized pastime into a competitive sport. Beers promoted lacrosse with remarkable energy, and clubs soon appeared in towns across the young country. He even campaigned for the game to be recognized as Canada’s national pastime.

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In the early twentieth century, interest in the outdoor game began to fade. In the 1930s, arena owners came up with a solution that also solved a problem of their own: hockey rinks sat empty all summer, earning nothing. Box lacrosse, as the new version became known, is played indoors on the arena floor once the ice has been removed, with fewer players and a much smaller playing area than the field game. Its speed and constant physical contact drew large crowds, and box lacrosse soon became the dominant form of the sport in Canada. Today, the country’s best senior and junior box lacrosse teams compete each year for two national trophies, the Mann Cup and the Minto Cup.

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Lacrosse has also enjoyed moments on the international stage. Canadian teams won the Olympic lacrosse tournaments of 1904 and 1908, but soon afterwards the sport was dropped as an Olympic medal event, and it stayed off the medal program for many decades. At home, its official status took far longer to arrive than many people realize. For generations, Canadians assumed that lacrosse had been declared the national game around the time of Confederation, yet no law said so until 1994, when Parliament passed the National Sports of Canada Act. The act named lacrosse the national summer sport and hockey the national winter sport. Meanwhile, the Haudenosaunee field their own national team in international competition, a powerful reminder that the game remains closely tied to the people who created it.