"The game was different then," says Jerry Schmidt, 58, who grew up in Baltimore. "Today the sticks are synthetic and totally symmetrical, so players are much more ambidextrous. In my day the sticks were wood, carved by Indians and strung with leather. The ball would come off them different ways from each side. You never really knew how it would fly."
At Johns Hopkins from 1959 to ’62, Jerry Schmidt was lacrosse’s dominating force, the forerunner of the physical attackman. He was 5’10″ and 190 pounds, fast and tough and mean. Schmidt was willing to put a shoulder down and turn the competition into roadkill, much to the shock of defensemen used to facing smaller forwards. Thirty-six years later he remains the only lacrosse player to have appeared on SI’s cover.
Schmidt never played on artificial turf, never wore a streamlined helmet and never had formal weight training the way college players do now. In fact, he even missed Johns Hopkins’s heyday. During his three All-America seasons with the Blue Jays, in which he scored 93 goals, he failed to win an NCAA “title, though his charismatic play did help establish the foundation for a program that would go on to win 11 national championships and produce 229 more All-Americas.
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