This article by Jacksonville midfielder Jeremy Winston, as told to Matt DaSilva, appears in the September/October edition of US Lacrosse Magazine as part of our “Faces on the Field” series. Don’t get the mag? Join US Lacrosse today to start your subscription.

I went to school in south Dallas. 

Bridge Lacrosse was the foundation that really started building lacrosse in Dallas. They came to my school, and the people who were running the organization were all white. Off the bat, I kind of figured it was a white sport.

When I was a kid, I played football and basketball. I started playing lacrosse in second grade, and I really liked it a lot. I started playing more lacrosse than football, and eventually in middle school and high school, I would play on club teams, and those club teams would be predominantly white.

I vividly remember one of my first-ever lacrosse camps was a Max Seibald camp out in far north Dallas. I was the only black kid there. That was pretty weird. 

I eventually got used to it as I got older. It didn’t scare me away from the game, because I enjoyed it too much to let something like that get in my head. 

My dad was very good at making me a tough person when it comes to things of that matter. My dad would preach that to me. I may be the only black kid out here, but I can score just like any other kid, or I can score more goals than anybody on the field. That was preached to me a lot as a kid, and it still is now.

There were jokes. When I was younger, maybe at a late practice and the stadium lights would turn off, one of my friends would be like, “Oh, where did he go?” 

But honestly, I don’t really think much about the race involved with lacrosse. I just try to be myself on the field. 

When I first started playing lacrosse in Dallas, nobody really knew what lacrosse was except for the white people who knew about lacrosse. Maybe they lived in the north before they moved down to Dallas. It has since grown in Texas. It’s becoming a hotbed. There are a lot of recruits coming out of Texas. 

If lacrosse has a chance to grow in America, then eventually, it won’t be an all-white sport. 

It’ll just be a sport.