From Then to Now
Club History
COLUMBIA LACROSSE — OLDER THAN THE MORNINGSIDE CAMPUS
Columbia Spectator, April 22, 1881
A few of you have noted that the 1963 founding of our club was not the first instance of lacrosse being played in Morningside Heights. This is true — in fact, the history of lacrosse at Columbia actually pre-dates Columbia's move from Midtown to Morningside Heights in 1897. The first mention of lacrosse at Columbia occurs in an April 22, 1881 article in the Columbia Daily Spectator, which states, "A Lacrosse Club has been formed in college, but at present its membership is not large." One month later, on May 26, 1881, the team participated in its first-ever game, a 4-0 loss to NYU at the original Polo Grounds, on 110th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue. This game was part of a tournament organized by the U.S. National Lacrosse Association, founded in 1879 as the sport's original governing body. Harvard and Princeton also participated in this tournament.
The earliest edition of the team lasted until 1883, then disbanded for the next fifteen years.
In January 1898, the Columbia Lacrosse Association was formed under the leadership of Watson Savage, a 1900 graduate of the Law School. His classmate R.H.E. Starr captained the team at its revival, and 1895 Architecture School graduate Giles Whiting was the team's first coach.
Columbia joined Harvard and Cornell as members of the Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (ILA) for the 1898 season. Other opponents that year included Stevens Tech, City College of New York, and the post-graduate Crescent Athletic Club of Brooklyn. Home games were played at Berkley Oval in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, a significant distance from the Morningside campus. The first such home game occurred on May 14, 1898--an 8-5 loss to Harvard.
The lack of a suitable home field was a significant hindrance to the earliest Columbia lacrosse teams. These ancient Lions did not record a win until their second season, when they bested the Staten Island Athletic Club team by a score of 4-3 on April 22, 1899. Attackman Jonhston Covert scored the winning goal in the final minute of play in a game played on the north shore of Staten Island. Columbia would defeat a future Ivy rival for the first time later that year at Berkley Oval, taking down Harvard 6-3 on May 12 at the Berkley Oval. The Spectator reported this victory over Harvard as the most significant win by the Columbia lacrosse team to date. Columbia bested Harvard again the following year, by the same score, in the first known lacrosse game to be played on South Field. This would be the team's last victory until it established a more permanent presence on South Field in 1903.
THE EARLIEST EDITION OF THE TEAM LASTED UNTIL 1883, THEN DISBANDED FOR THE NEXT FIFTEEN YEARS.
1903 saw a parade of victories for the Light Blue at South Field over future Ivy rivals. These included a 3-2 win over Penn on May 2 and a 5-1 takedown of defending league champion Cornell on May 11. Columbia went to Cambridge on June 2 seeking to win its first Inter-University Lacrosse League title, but were unable to beat Harvard for that honor.
After a winless 1904 season, the Light Blue captured its first lacrosse championship of any kind in 1905. That year, the ancient Lions went 6-3 and once again recorded wins over both Cornell and Penn. Though they again lost to Harvard, Columbia wound up splitting the Inter-University Lacrosse League championship with Cornell and Harvard as all three had identical 2-1 league records.
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1906 saw a significant shakeup of lacrosse's organizational structure as the Inter-University Lacrosse League and Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (in which Columbia participated for one season in 1898 before moving) merged to form a new league, the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse League (USILL). Columbia was a charter member of this eight-team organization, which awarded national championships until the NCAA began sponsoring lacrosse in 1971, and still exists today under a slightly different acronym, the United States Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association (USILA). The new USILL split into northern and southern divisions--Columbia was placed in the northern division along with Harvard, Cornell and Penn. The southern division consisted of Stevens, Lehigh, Johns Hopkins, and Swarthmore.
Columbia had modest success in first three USILL seasons. Highlights of these included a 9-0 shutout of Penn on South Field to close the 1906 season and a rare trip to Baltimore to face Johns Hopkins in 1908--Hopkins won the game 11-0. South Field closed to the lacrosse team and all other sports teams for renovations in the spring of 1909, forcing the Lions to play home games at the Crescent Athletic Club in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn--even today more than an hour from campus by subway from Morningside Heights. Practices were held a significant distance in the other direction, at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.
Despite the absence of a true home field, 1909 would be one of the ancient Lions' best seasons. The Light Blue would go 5-4 overall and 3-2 against USILL opposition, recording wins over Lehigh, Cornell and Hobart. The Hobart victory on May 14, 1909 in Brooklyn tied Columbia with Harvard for the USILL North Division title. A tiebreaker game was discussed but ultimately not played due to most of both teams having left campus for the summer. This 1909 team included some famous Columbia names--Harvey Mudd, who would later go on to have a School of Engineering building named after him, James Mackintosh, and Condict Cutler, a university trustee in the 1950s.
That victory would prove to be the last lacrosse victory for Columbia for 54 years. The 1910 team went winless despite returning to South Field for its home games. The team, which was large enough for most of the decade to have freshman and sophomore subdivisions underneath a varsity premier group, was struggling to attract new members as a series of Spectator advertisements attested. The captain elected for the 1911 season unexpectedly resigned in November 1910, and no candidate stepped forward to replace him. Citing the absence of a captain, Columbia's University Athletic Association ordered the lacrosse team disbanded in January 1911, despite a series of meetings and a fundraising drive that attempted to save the team. The team persisted as an intramural outfit during 1911, playing games between the class subdivisions (freshmen/sophomores vs. juniors/seniors). An appeal petition to reinstate the team for 1912 failed, and lacrosse subsequently disappeared from Morningside for half a century.
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Though the University cited the lack of leadership of the lacrosse team as its reason for dropping the sport, the reality of the decision was somewhat more complicated. The lacrosse team was competing with several other teams for space on South Field, among them baseball, track, football, and soccer. The team was also thought to have fewer fans and supporters than the aforementioned sports. By the time the Baker Field complex opened in 1923, somewhat alleviating the space constraints, all players connected to the lacrosse team had graduated or otherwise moved on from Columbia.
Three attempts were made to revive the team. The first, in 1925, involved a meeting to set up a freshman team but no concrete action followed. James Mackintosh, an alumnus of the 1909 champions, attempted a second, more organized revival in 1951 that involved at least one practice on South Field. No games were recorded in Spectator as a result of this revival. A third attempt in 1957 led to meetings in Hartley Hall but nothing else. Finally, in 1963, a group of freshmen led by Ray Rizzuti CC'66 combined with law-student and former varsity players Leo Ullman LAW '64 and Gene Rostov LAW '64 to create today's Columbia Lacrosse Club.
1908 Columbia University Varsity Lacrosse Team
Special thanks are in order to Walid Yassir SEAS'88 for contributing a photo of the 1908 team. The 1908 team were a motley bunch, and many of these same men would get ready for practices at Van Cortlandt Park the following year by putting on their gear in a nearby saloon. We can only imagine what they consumed in that saloon/locker room prior to running line drills!