"The Armadillo"

Washington & Lee vs Univeristy of North Carolina 1982

The Story

In 1982 we had just lost to Virginia and North Carolina was the No. 1 team in the country and had just hammered Virginia. So we sat down and tried to figure out how in the world we could be competitive. I had noticed along the way that some teams had gathered their players together and had broken out with everybody cradling the ball as a means of deception to the defense. That struck me as an excellent opportunity to control the ball if in fact you did not break out and used it as a stall technique within the rules.

The week leading up to the North Carolina game was, to say the least, an interesting week of practice. The Armadillo, as we called it, wound up consisting of five players locking arms with one player in the middle with the ball. We gave that player in the middle a sawed-off goalie stick with a very deep pocket so the ball could not be dislodged. Since you could only have one goalie stick in the game at one time, the fellow that was playing in the goal had a regular offensive stick. But we didn’t expect him to have to make many saves. We learned that you couldn’t move the Armadillo because that would be a moving pick and you had to set up the Armadillo inside the attack or goal area so as not to be called for stalling. So the trick was that you needed to shoot the ball, miss the goal and when the ball came back into play, have your ball-carrier step into the Armadillo and have everybody close arms around him. I figured, ‘What the heck?’ It was worth a shot. We called the officials during the week to make sure they understood what we were going to do and they double- checked the rulebook to make sure we were in accordance. As it turned out, North Carolina became very frustrated, fouled our guys repeatedly and we were then able to break out of the Armadillo and go to the goal in man-up situations and score a couple early goals. We were up 3-0 and then as the game went along, the officials made it more difficult for us because they didn’t allow us to intentionally miss the shot and get into the Armadillo. They would not call it a shot and instead gave the ball to North Carolina when we shot it out of bounds. As it turned out, we lost the game 11-8, which is a pretty normal score for a lacrosse game. My only regret was that when it was 8-8 that we didn’t go back into the Armadillo and simply play for overtime. Instead, we tried to score a goal late in the game and were unsuccessful and North Carolina scored the last three goals to win. I was extremely happy when the Rules Committee decided to outlaw the Armadillo on the Monday following the game with North Carolina, because I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else using this technique to be competitive. It was strictly a one-game thing and forced certain rule changes to occur. As it turned out, it’s a little bit of history and we laugh about it as we look back.

-Jack Emmer (Source Inside Lacrosse)