Face off, scoop, run, cradle, run, pass, score. I've watched my son's lacrosse team win yet another game tonight and my thoughts went back to six or seven years ago when our school district didn't have any lacrosse team at all. I remember a general meeting of parents in an auditorium of a middle school then. Most of us there didn't know a thing about lacrosse - only that it's a sport played mostly in the East Coast and a few schools in the Portland area. The organizers called for volunteer coaches anyway - no experience necessary. I didn't volunteer but a group of parents did. And look at the fruits of their dedication and commitment - high-performing teams and a league swarming with young boys and girls enthusiastically scooping and cradling balls with those mesh-headed sticks.

As my thoughts these days are focused on product design and development for bibliographic data for my job interviews, I can't help wondering how games, like lacrosse, were designed and developed. As the info goes in Wikipedia, lacrosse originated from Native American tribes who played the game on a much larger scale - hundreds of players and lasting several days and for purposes of conflict resolution and preparing young men for warfare. In the mid-19th century, a Canadian dentist (!) supposedly codified the game and scaled down the number of players and the length of time to finish the game. Other modifications to the game came later, including modifications to the design of equipment used.

Uhm. Where are my thoughts going to? Uh, I'm just wondering how folk practices become codified and applied to different contexts. Think of Linnaeus codifying folk taxonomies into his more structured hierarchy. But I digress. I'm trying too hard to fill my mind with substantial thoughts to keep out the pain and humiliation of losing a job like that.