A 67-year-old retired lacrosse player and teacher has compiled the history of girls’ and women’s box lacrosse in Richmond from 1972 until 1982, when the sport died down.
Vicky Brkich was inspired to create The Lacrosse Girls of Summers Past: A Scrapbook History of Girls and Women’s Box Lacrosse in Richmond from 1972-1982 when she looked through her memorabilia.
The timing was right, as this year marks 50 years since Brkich first joined the Gulf Car Wash Richmond Junior Girls team alongside Satwant Mahal, Stephanie Schuss and Christine Munro.
The four women won the title of Women’s Provincial Box Lacrosse for four consecutive years from 1972 to 1975, an unprecedented feat that earned them a Distinguished Athletic Award from the city of Richmond.
Brkich then went on to win the Women’s National Box Lacrosse Champion titles with the Richmond Titans in 1980 and 1981.
“I decided, ‘You know what, I'm going to record this,’ because if I don't record it, and write this down for people to remember, it's going to be forgotten forever,” said Brkich.
The project took eight months, with Brkich starting in November 2021 and finishing her last update on Jul. 19 this year.
“I started to do some research and started to phone players. And ask them, ‘Can you send me team pictures? Can you send me newspaper articles? What kind of stuff do you have that shows what we did back in the day when we played box lacrosse for Richmond?’,” she said.
Brkich managed to get a few responses, but she hit a goldmine when she decided to contact women from teams they played against, who had information such as league schedules and game scores.
“What I wasn't able to get from newspaper articles, I got from their memorabilia,” Brkich explained.
“When I started the book, I thought I’d have about 20 to 50 pages. But I ended up having 224 pages of memories, pictures, statistics, about girls and women who played box lacrosse between 1972 and 1982,” she said.
Wanting to be remembered
For Brkich and many of the women in her book, playing box lacrosse was some of the best times of their lives.
“Those of us that played lacrosse in the 1970s, that was a time when women and girls were not really encouraged to play sports, and especially not to play something as physical and demanding and rough as box lacrosse.
“So we didn’t get a lot of support,” explained Brkich. “We had to fight for everything, we really did.”
For example, Brkich had to fight to remove the league's age cut-off so she could continue playing after turning 21 years old. But she still remembers those days fondly, as teams in the sport thrived despite the lack of support.
Another reason that makes these memories special is the disappearance of box lacrosse after 1982, when many, including herself, switched over to play field lacrosse to try out for the first-ever Canadian national team, explained Brkich.
“At the time, I wasn’t all that worried about it because I was now playing field lacrosse and I was playing for Canada… But later, after I was no longer playing field lacrosse and I wish I could play box lacrosse, I felt quite bad,” she said.
“In fact, a lot of women were devastated when the league folded after 1982.”
The sport has since been revived, and just this month, women’s box lacrosse teams got to compete at the Canada Games after a 37-year hiatus.
“We had a fabulous 10 years that Richmond had established girls’ lacrosse teams. We did very well and we all love the game… And we all wish that we were young again to play the game.
“We would do it all over again, even when we got injured — and a lot of us got injured. But we would do it all over again that’s for sure,” said Brkich.
Having finished the book just a month ago, Brkich has already moved on to her next big project — recording the history of field lacrosse in B.C. from 1982 to 1993. She’s also planning to advocate to remove the 21-year-old age cap for the women’s box lacrosse junior league, so that anyone above 17 can play together and those above 21 can have access to the same competitive opportunities.
"I don't think it's very fair and I think they should do away with it. That's my only disappointment with what's happening with lacrosse today. ... For those who do want to play, they should be allowed to play," she said.
A free copy of the book can be downloaded from the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame website, or accessed at the Richmond Public Library and City of Richmond Archives.
“I am just putting it out there for anybody who wants it can have it.
And I wanted the Lacrosse Hall of Fame to have it so that there will be something on record that we existed and we played the game — and we played the game very well,” Brkich explained.
