This was so neat to be able to read early!! My husband coaches high school lacrosse and played himself growing up & all thru college! I wasn't ery familiar with the sport until we started dating.
Truthfully, I've struggled to really grasp it because I suck at it. Hahaha without having thrown and caught the ball successfully—and at speed—I feared I'd never understand (wow that sounds so dramatic on paper lmao). The science was a game changer!!!

I've gotten a much better feel for the sport both while reading as well as in retrospect. There are fun facts or images from this book that have stayed rent free in my mind since.

I'd highly recommend this book to kids and parents alike, esp if you—like me—haven't had the easiest time seeing the allure.

{Thank you bunches to Amy B. Rogers, Rosen Publishing Group & NetGalley for the DRC in exchange for my honest review!}

As a middle school teacher, I spend a lot is time learning about the sports and hobbies of my students. This well-organized book taught me so much about the sport! I now understand the importance of the lacrosse stick- and will have much more respect for the inevitable pile that ends up behind my desk for”safekeeping” on practice days.

I will add this book to the sports section of my classroom library, and can’t wait for my lacrosse-obsessed students to start art checking it out.

I also plan to share a copy with my science teacher partner- this will be a fantastic source for her when she is coming physics!

A big thanks to Net Galley for giving me this sneak peek!

Part of a set on sports science, this seems to very successfully get the sports fan into the STEM classroom, or perhaps the young scientist onto the grass. Starting with a history of lacrosse we turn to considering what happens when we play, therefore we get the specifics of the stick and the ball (with its prescribed bounce), and some of the biomechanics behind being a successful player. How to train, and what injuries might occur, also feature, before the science behind new developments such as mandating helmets for girls and VAR, close things off.

What this proved to me is that this publisher can do the denser, more convoluted book for the older reader, just as well as it can the quick chapter book non-fiction for elsewhere in the school library. But that's not to say this is perfect – I think for the STEM lessons to have come across properly we'd have needed non-sport-related illustrations – especially on the argument about centrifugal versus centripetal forces. Diagrams such as we do get for the medical aspect of sports injuries are fine.

This, all told, covers a lot of subjects, from the physics of the ball to the psychology of the determined winner. I can see a strong overlap between this and the other five books in the set – how different is an ACL or a can-do attitude for a hockey player?! But certainly in isolation this can only be a rampant success. I'd never have thought myself interested enough in a sport I've never seen in action to spend a couple of hours learning about it. This might have been a lot drier than it was, too – it might have made me feel like I'd just been thrown on the lacrosse pitch and told to fend for myself. Instead it was very readable, and educational, and not limited to purely the science of the game. I know a lot more about it from these pages, after a very informative and amenable lesson. To me that's four and a half stars.