Lacrosse is one of the more popular sports in the USA.
It’s true that the playing numbers and TV audience are much lower than for the big five sports of football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer.
However, Lacrosse has a professional league, and multiple college tournaments.
This article compares rugby’s popularity with other sports in several different categories:
- Number of professional lacrosse clubs
- General participation (people who play at any level)
- Match attendances at professional lacrosse matches
- Television audiences
- Popularity of lacrosse in schools
Number Of Professional Lacrosse Teams In The U.S.
There are eight professional outdoor lacrosse teams in the U.S. that play in the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL).
About Six U.S. box lacrosse teams play with Canadian teams in the semi-professional indoors National Lacrosse League (NLL).
There was an older tournament called Major League Lacrosse that merged with the PLL in December 2020. One team transferred into the PLL to increase the numbers.
Where are the PLL teams based?
The PLL isn’t based around home and away venues. Instead, it’s a tour-based league. All the teams travel to a city each weekend.
Here is a map of the locations across the country in 2022:
This table lists the locations of the PLL teams:
| 2022 | City | State |
| June | Albany | New York |
| June | Charlotte | North Carolina |
| June | Long Island | New York |
| June | Baltimore | Maryland |
| July | Minneapolis | Minneapolis |
| July | Boston | Massachussets |
| July | Fairfield | Connecticut |
| July | Dallas | Texas |
| August | Denver | Colorado |
| August | Salt Lake City | Utah |
| August | Seattle | Washington |
| September | Boston | Massachussets |
| September | Washington | D.C. |
| September | Philadelphia | Pennsylvania |
Where are the NLL teams based?
The National Lacrosse League is very much an East Coast affair. This map shows the locations in the U.S.:
Number Of People Who Go To Lacrosse Matches In The U.S.
Because of world events impacting 2020 and 2021, I’ll go back to the 2019 season to look at attendances.
The average attendance at the match weekends of the Premier Lacrosse League was 12,480 people in 2019.
The average attendance at matches at the National Lacrosse League was 8,035 in 2019.
NCAA (College)
The biggest attendances at college level are at semi-finals and finals.
In 2019, the final had an attendance of 31,528 in Philadelphia.
The average attendance for earlier round D1 matches was a little short of one thousand people in that season.
How Many People Play Lacrosse In The U.S.?
Let’s look at the number of players across the professional and college leagues.
The Premier Lacrosse League has 26-player rosters. With eight teams in the U.S., that makes 208 players in the PLL.
The number of college students playing lacrosse has increased significantly in the last decade.
This is the split of male and female participants in the NCAA:
- 14,000+ male players
- 12,000 female players
Popularity As Shown By TV Viewership
How much TV viewers watched the final or championship match? And what about the average audiences across all televised matches?
In the 2020 PLL, Chaos took on Whipsnakes in the championship game. NBC reported that they got 340,000 viewers for this match.
The PLL was covered across NBC and NBCSN in 2020. The average viewership per match was 153,000.
What about the NLL?
It’s hard to get figures for the NLL. This is partly because their coverage was spread across different digital streaming media.
The league has recently signed an agreement with ESPN, which should make the coverage easier to find.
How does lacrosse compare with other sports?
Let’s take a look at figures for some other sports from a similar period.
| ESPN’s Monday Night Football (Week 7) | 3.7 million |
| College Football (Tennessee vs Alabama) | 4.7 million |
| MLB average across 2019 | 4.75 million |
| NBA average in open week of 2019 | 1.8 million |
How Popular Is Lacrosse In High Schools?
Over 213 thousand high school boys and girls played lacrosse in the 2018/19 school year.
These are the numbers over a three year period:
- 2016/17: 205K+ students
- 2017/18: 210K+ students
- 2019/20: 213K+ students
How Popular Is Lacrosse In Google Searches?
Google provides a display of how search terms are trending over time.
This graph shows how “Lacrosse” has trended from the summer of 2018 to the spring of 2022.
The lacrosse trend is the blue line. Don’t pay much attention to the numbers on the X-axis, those represent an internal Google metric (as opposed to searches).
Where it gets interesting is comparing lacrosse to two other “niche” sports in the United States: lacrosse and rugby.
Lacrosse and volleyball have different peaks throughout the year. Lacrosse peaks in the first half of the year, while volleyball has its heyday in the second half.
By the way, that massive spike for volleyball in August 2021 was due to the Tokyo Olympics.
These are the main takeaways:
- Lacrosse is less popular than volleyball in general
- There are some months in the year where lacrosse overtakes volleyball in Google searches e.g. March to May
- Lacrosse is more popular than rugby, except during the Summer Olympics
