Men’s lacrosse is back at the Mecca with a new, fully rostered team. The team is one of only four HBCUs to have a men’s lacrosse team, according to Fox 5 News, and there hasn’t been a men’s team in the sport at Howard University in over eight years. Now, Howard men’s lacrosse is back with a team that is eager to put in the work on the field, gain more exposure, and serve the community.
The men’s lacrosse program was brought back to Howard University last school year by club president, Julian Forbes, a senior computer science major from Brooklyn, New York. “It started off as an idea that I had to bring lacrosse to Howard because I have always wanted to play. I would just walk around with my lacrosse stick and people would just come up to me and ask me if we had a team and I would just say ‘no but I’m trying to start one’ and after a few weeks of doing that, attraction just came and people started coming out,” Forbes said. “We started having practices only once or twice a week, but at first, it was just me and Kai holding practices by ourselves, and then Trey joined. Eventually, it just got more and more people interested.”
That two-man practice on the Yard would then lead to having a fully-rostered team in the same year loaded with new talent. This new club team laid all of the groundwork during their startup last school year, and now anticipate an amazing start to the fall 2023 semester. Forbes emphasized the difference in team progression now that a new semester is about to begin.
“At first it was a little bit of a struggle to get people to show up to practice and be involved in what we were trying to do. But as we’ve grown and our presence has been a little more on campus, we’ve had games against Morehouse, so you know people have more of a willingness to show up and wanna get better for competition,” he said. “And we’re just interested in more games to come and more opportunities that we have to offer them.”
Over the summer, the Howard men’s lacrosse team continued with team preparation. The team had the opportunity to make new life-long community connections and gain valuable team support. This was done through the club team’s fundraising efforts in creating a GoFundMe that was showcased on the Howard men’s lacrosse Instagram page.
Club vice-president, Treylin Lewis, a senior from Avon, Connecticut spoke to the team’s GoFundMe start and development. “We first launched it this summer and originally we weren’t expecting too much because we’re a younger club and spring was our first season. But, once we dropped it and spread the word about it, we ended up getting a lot of attraction and support from it,” Lewis said. He also mentioned Howard alumni being some of the most active supporters of the campaign.
“With the DMV being a lacrosse hub as a whole, a lot of people really wanted to support and see our success,” Lewis said.
Howard men’s lacrosse intends to put an emphasis on growing its social media to engage more the Howard community and bring more exposure to men’s lacrosse on campus. “We’re also looking forward to our community service and on-campus events as well because the community is the whole point of us doing this in the first place,” said Forbes.
Kai Cattouse-Cowans, a junior sports medicine major from Skokie, Illinois, who serves as the club team’s secretary shared exciting new methods to showcase the team even more this school year on social media, while also providing community engagement. “We wanna get more involved with community involvement. Whether it’s going to high schools or middle schools, working with students, having events on campus, pushing out our social media accounts, and also games or special events that we may have,” said Cattouse-Cowans.
“We want to have regular updates whether it’s games, practices, events, highlights of players, player profiles, and trying to get to know us as players and students,” he said. “Maybe also a little behind-the-scenes of practices and polls with followers asking them questions just to be more engaging.”
Howard men’s lacrosse has a lot in store for this upcoming school year to increase the team’s visibility and ultimately join a new league.
“We were actually able to secure new equipment, enough for a full team and we’re also excited about the incoming freshman that we were able to be in contact with last year,” Forbes said. “We were planning to do a students versus team game and [invite] other schools to play us. And we’re actually in the process of trying to find a new league for us to join so that we’ll have even more games for people to come out to.”
Copy edited by Whitney Meritus
