The Birth of Women’s Lacrosse
Mikaela Garcia — July 10, 2021
courtesy of St. Leonards Historical Archives.
Lacrosse, originally known as stickball, was first played by the Algonquian tribe in the St. Lawrence Valley located in the northeastern area of North America, according to World Lacrosse. It then spread to other tribes and areas in North America to what is known today as Ohio, Maryland, New York and Canada.
The game of stickball was also played by other tribes in the more northern sections of North America. As colonists continued to arrive, they started to participate in their own games of lacrosse, first starting off with teams strictly for men (World Lacrosse). However, this eventually changed in 1884.
According to, “History of Lacrosse at St. Leonards,” by lacrosse historian Jane Claydon, Louisa Lumsden and Frances Dove witnessed a game of lacrosse played between colonists and Canguwaya natives during their trip to Montreal, Canada. Returning home to the small town of St. Andrews in Scotland, Dove, who at the time was the headmistress of St. Leonard’s School, helped found the first girl’s lacrosse team. The team consisted of 8 players, who played their first game in 1890.
As the school continued to support the growth of lacrosse, a student, Rosabelle Sinclair, played lacrosse during her high school career. She then attended the Madame Bergman Osterber’s College of Physical Training for two years. After graduating, she played lacrosse for the Scottish women’s team from 1913-1914, as well as in England in 1921, while maintaining a teaching position in England (Claydon).
After 1921, she left and moved to the United States, where she was an athletic director and physical education coach at Bryn Mawr College in Baltimore, Md. She introduced women’s lacrosse to the school and helped found the first women’s lacrosse team in the United States in 1926 (Claydon).
Sinclair’s groundbreaking work for encouraging the spread of women’s lacrosse in the United States slowly led to the foundation of the United States Women’s Lacrosse Association, the USWLA, in 1931. Sinclair went on to become the first woman to be inducted into the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1992, as well as the Scotland Hall of Fame in 2013.
With the work done by Sinclair and Dove, the growing sport of women’s lacrosse was able to spread to more people faster.