Few things in sports are purer than youth athletes celebrating a hard-earned win. The athletes are not famous, and millions of dollars are not on the line.
The purest, most unbridled victory celebration in Detroit high school sports history may have occurred on a lacrosse field in Auburn Hills, Michigan, on 26 April 2021. It was not a rivalry game, and no championship was won.
The victory was the culmination of a two-year wait for Detroit Cass Technical High School girls’ lacrosse team, the first high school girls’ lacrosse team in the city of Detroit. A team that for two years has been told to wait.
Wait to return to school. Wait to see your friends again. Wait to play sports. Wait to win.
It was not a comfortable time. It included a season ending before it started, death and uncertainty overshadowing their city, and personal struggles with mental and physical health.
Cass Tech is a public magnet school. The student body is 85% Black and full of excellence. The school is one of only 37 schools in Michigan to offer the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, and its distinguished alumni list rivals elite prep schools in metro Detroit.
Despite its merits, Cass Tech had offered only three spring sports for girls until it added lacrosse. With 2,400 students, that left more than 1,000 girls with no opportunity to play sports in the spring.
Deja Crenshaw and Alexia Carroll-Williams are seniors and team captains. When Cass Tech started a boys’ lacrosse team in 2019, they wanted the same opportunity.
“Lacrosse is something that you don’t usually hear about in urban cities,” Crenshaw said. “It’s really important that we give people the opportunity to play a sport that they may not have ever heard of.”
Crenshaw and other girls approached the administration to ask for a lacrosse team. At that time, coach Summer Aldred was helping with the new boys’ team. She received permission to teach basic lacrosse skills to Cass Tech girls that April.
After more than 30 girls attended the introductory sessions, Aldred got approval to start a girls’ team in 2020, but without funding from the school. Donations, including a $10,000 gift from an alumnus, helped start the program.
On 9 March 2020, about 55 girls showed up to tryouts. In a sport that has few Black players (3% of college women lacrosse players are Black), the team was 90% Black. They were going to be Team One. A team of many firsts.
The next day, Michigan confirmed its first two cases of Covid-19, and a week later, the state closed all schools. Team One never played a game.
Covid-19 devastated Detroit, especially during the early months of the pandemic. Hospitals overflowed and the death rate soared.
More than a year later, Cass Tech students still have not returned to school. Until practice resumed this March, the girls on this year’s team had not seen most of their friends and teammates since the last day of tryouts in 2020.
The first day of practice this year had a different feel. Only 15 girls showed up. They seemed more relieved to be out of the house than excited to play.
Without in-person classes, team members and coaches had a hard time recruiting freshmen to play. Aldred said 21 more girls expressed interest but could not play because their parents were concerned about Covid-19. She said the coaches tried to communicate the precautions they were taking, “but at the end of the day, we have to respect family wishes, and we definitely understand.”
Zahria Liggans is a senior captain and the team’s goalie. The Skillman Foundation, which works with children in the city, named her one of 20 Black Detroiters making history, and she has been on the board of Teen Hype, a youth-development nonprofit in Detroit, since she was 16.
Liggans is creating a documentary for her International Baccalaureate program about the effects of Covid-19 on high school athletes. She interviewed Cass Tech athletes from several sports and learned how they struggled with mental health and worried about losing athletic scholarship opportunities because of the pandemic.
Liggans and her teammates struggled with Covid, too. She rarely got out of the house and missed being able to socialize with her friends. She felt a loss of control, because it seemed as if the pandemic had no end in sight.
Alexia Carroll-Williams and her sister, Kayla, a sophomore on the team, could rarely leave the house and could not socialize with large groups. Their family was careful about the pandemic, because it took some of their relatives.
Playing lacrosse gave them both an outlet to find some normalcy again and a way to bond with each other. “It made me feel good, because I was doing the same thing over and over every day,” Alexia said. “Being on the field, it’s like an escape from reality.”
“On the field, we just see each other,” Kayla said. “Lacrosse is something that we can connect in and talk about. And I look up to her because she knows how to play.”
Lacrosse helped Liggans regain balance. She found that exercise helped her mental health, and the routine of practice brought back the control over her life she had lost. She said, “It has helped me find happiness in the now.”
The final team roster consists of 18 players, 14 of whom are Black. They do not look like the teams they play. Although lacrosse is a Native American game, its participants are primarily white.
Liggans said, “It’s OK to step into these spaces where there might not be a lot of you, because you can open up a channel for somebody else, for people who look like you.”
Alexia Carroll-Williams said she’s aware that she stands out in lacrosse because she’s African American and goes to a Detroit school. “I really hope that it grows so much that I see more Black people playing, Black girls especially,” she said.
Cass Tech’s first game was two weeks after their first practice. They played Lake Orion High School on its large, tree-lined campus, almost 40 miles from Cass Tech. Lake Orion draws its students from several suburbs, all of which are more than 90% white.
As they would before every game, the Cass Tech girls knelt together during the national anthem. Each girl made a personal decision whether to kneel, and the whole team chose to.
“It definitely is an uncomfortable feeling when all eyes are on you, and everybody else is standing and you’re kneeling,” Liggans said. “But at the end of the day, change has to come. And if you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not willing to change.”
Eyes may be on them during the game, too. “It’s an extra added pressure. We can’t be too aggressive on the field, because it’s going to be seen like, ‘Oh, look at those Black girls from Detroit,’” Liggans said.
Assistant coach Christianne Malone started playing lacrosse in sixth grade at University Liggett, a prep school in nearby Grosse Pointe Woods, and continued playing throughout high school. As one of a few Black students at the school, she was used to being one of a handful of girls of color on the field.
When Malone graduated in 2000, about 20 high schools in Michigan had girls’ lacrosse teams, most of them at private schools or public schools in wealthy suburbs. Today, the Michigan High School Athletic Association lists 92 high school girls’ lacrosse teams.
“It’s still not nearly as diverse as it could be by this point in time,” Malone said. “Twenty years later, it’s almost the same demographics as it was when I was first playing.”
Playing Lake Orion, one of the top teams in the state this year, was trial by fire for Cass Tech. Lake Orion scored 26 seconds into the game and cruised to 21-1 victory. The lone bright spot was Kayla Carroll-Williams scoring the first goal in Detroit high school girls’ lacrosse history.
The schedule did not get much easier. Cass Tech lost their first six games, and the sixth loss was rough. The coaches met with the captains after the game and listened to them explain the team’s struggles dealing with the pandemic and the weight of expectations.
The captains held a team-only meeting the next day. They agreed it was time to forget the losses and start over as if it were a new season.
Liggans noticed an immediate improvement at practice that day. “It just lit a fire, and you could see the excitement now and people wanting to play the sport and wanting to come and practice and wanting to get better.”
And they carried the new intensity to their next game against Avondale High School in Auburn Hills. With 8:59 left and Cass Tech holding an 8-6 lead, junior Jourdan Geter-Adams scored, breaking the dam that held back Cass Tech’s confidence. Sophomore Taylor Weston scored three more times and Kayla Carroll-Williams once.
The clock stopped with 15 seconds left and Cass Tech leading 13-6. Liggans screamed to her teammates, “Fifteen seconds! Fifteen seconds!”
When the final whistle blew, Alexia threw her arms into the air and sprinted to Zahria, who lifted her in a huge hug. The rest of the team swarmed them, everyone holding each other as if letting go would let their victory slip away.
But who could blame them?
If you finally grasped something you waited so long for, would you let go?