Need another tipoff that the sport of lacrosse is early combat training? The leading equipment purveyor is Warrior Sports.

This photo was taken at the 2009 Jamboree in Denver Colorado, where teams of little white boys converged to declare state champions. The sea of white was interrupted by a single black team, a girls team, I conjecture because women’s lacrosse is played more like field hockey, necessitating much less protective gear. From sticks to heads, to helmet, to Kevlar, every element of Lacrosse gear had a starting price of $120, going up.

Schools don’t have budgets to support both football and lacrosse armature. Lacrosse leagues are sort of the charter schools of youth sports: only those with disposable incomes need apply. If African American youth dominate you school sport programs, why not take you Anglo-Saxon tykes to fields where they can dominate each other without a challenger’s interruption? But I digress.

Lacrosse is for tots who already harbor an innate itch to thrust handguns forward, but have to be taught that, in every useful gunfight save those of James Bond, standard issue is an assault rifle, which necessitates both hands, and best represented in early boot camp as its earliest belligerent incarnation: the stick.

Kids like lacrosse because they get to swing their sticks at others with wild abandon. It’s especially fun, I’m told, when you really hate your opponents.