This is the first in a series of articles stemming from Mercer Island Lacrosse’s trip to Russia from July 28-Aug 6. The Seattle-area club, believed to be the first American team to visit Russia, will conduct coaching clinics and suit up against local players. US Lacrosse Magazine will be on hand to cover the historic visit, as well as the cultural exchange between the two nations. Follow along for more next week.

D

onnie Howard sat with his scooter in the middle of Red Square in Moscow, Russia, with one hand clamped onto the scooter and the other on his lacrosse stick that he took everywhere. Howard and his family were visiting Russia, the country where his mother, Ioulia, was born.

Howard was 10 at the time. He and his family were interested in seeing the Kremlin. But the locals were fixated on the stick.

“The people on Red Square, next to the Kremlin, were taking pictures of him instead of the Kremlin,” Ioulia Howard said. “We receive tons of questions. We tried to explain that this was lacrosse, but no one could even understand the word. They asked, ‘Is it a net for catching butterflies? Is it a net for getting the fish?’”

The Russian people had not seen a lacrosse stick, much less witnessed the game being played before. Donnie Howard, who played lacrosse in Mercer Island, Wash., also noticed their wayward gazes.

“I would just get super-weird looks from everyone, who had never seen a lacrosse stick, really,” he said. “My mom would explain to them that it’s a sport in America that’s growing popular.”

That was years ago, when the idea of lacrosse in the largest country in the world was just in its infancy. The same could be said for the Mercer Island youth program, which had just 60 players enrolled back in 2002.

Both programs have grown tremendously over the last half decade. They’ll meet this week, when members of the Mercer Island High School lacrosse team and their families make the trip to Russia to conduct clinics for hockey players and compete with Russian club teams in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

It’s a trip 18 months in planning and due in part to the Howard family and its ties to Ioulia’s home country. The goal is to showcase the sport to more Russian people, while providing the American high school students exposure to the humanity of a country often characterized by headlines. 

“It is giving kids a possibility to see life on another side, when they go to another country and they don’t speak English, where they read about it in newspapers and they get to see it for themselves,” Ioulia Howard said. “We cannot wait to see them in Red Square right next to the Kremlin with their lacrosse sticks. That's my dream.”

Although the itinerary came together in a matter of months, this trip has been years in the making. For Mercer Island Lacrosse, it’s the next step in the process of growing the program. 

Led by Islanders varsity boys’ coach Ian O’Hearn, who serves as the program director, Mercer Island has become one of the most popular areas for lacrosse in Washington. O’Hearn, who took the reins of the high school team in 2002 and became the state’s all-time winningest coach, also installed youth programs from middle school to kindergarten to help get children involved at an earlier age. As an upstate New York native, he knew he’d have to travel to play the best competition in the country.

So Mercer Island trekked to New York, Boston and other locations on the East Coast each year. Players visited college campuses and attended games along the way, to get a glimpse of life on another coast.

Thanks to O’Hearn’s efforts, Mercer Island now has approximately 350 kids grades K-12 in its program and the game as a whole has grown in Washington — with 81 high school programs. But this trip, he said, is taking the game to another level.

“This Russia trip is the next evolution in what we’ve been doing for 15 years,” O’Hearn said. “They’re going to this part of the world, especially now with the political scene that’s taboo. … This is a country that’s been around for thousands and thousands of years, has amazing culture, and we’ll get to talk to people on the ground and not just see from people in the media.”

When Mercer Island arrives in Russia, it will be welcomed by the Russian Lacrosse Federation, which also has grown steadily since 2007. That’s when the Moscow Rebels club team was founded by American coach David Diamonon and the St. Petersburg White Knights by Russian student Dmitry Petrov.

The Russian teams, at the beginning, mostly were comprised of expats from the United States, Japan and Australia, among other countries. The teams played against each other in Russia until 2013, when a Russian team competed in the Turkey Lacrosse Championship — its first international competition.

Russia debuted in the 2014 FIL World Championship in Denver, where some Mercer Island players were on hand. With so much activity around the world, more Russians became interested in the sport.

Now the rosters are comprised almost entirely of native Russians. However, it’s still a sport in its infancy in a large sporting nation.

“Russia is very conservative from a sports point of view,” said Russian national team player Artur Ventsel, who helped arrange the trip. “Soccer is the most popular sport, maybe hockey. Basketball and volleyball are famous sports in Russia. When we started develop the sport, it was one of the most challenging things, because we had to explain what the sport was about.”

Just recently, two new teams have popped up in Russia — in Yaroslavl and Krasnoyarsk.

But even with the steady growth of the sport, this trip wasn’t on the radar until last year, and it came about quite simply.

Ioulia Howard, who was born in Yaroslavl and emigrated to the United States just 17 years ago, regularly visited her relatives back home. She was planning a trip this year when she asked her son, Donnie, if he’d like to come.

Donnie Howard, a Boston University commit, said he would go if he could bring a friend.

“Sure,” Ioulia Howard said.

Time passed, and Donnie Howard came back with another proposal.

“Mom, what do you think if we could go all together?” he asked.

“What do you mean all together?” his mother answered.

“The whole team will go,” Donnie Howard said.

Ioulia Howard wondered what the team would accomplish in Russia.

“We are going to teach hockey players to play lacrosse,” Donnie Howard said.

That got the ball rolling, and Ioulia Howard and Ventsel have since helped hash out the details of an unprecedented encounter of two emerging lacrosse communities.