Shaker dads tap into their love of lacrosse to create a new pathway for future players.
By Joe Miller
Max Kelly on the playing field. Photos by Robert Muller.
For Shaker Heights High School athletes Max Kelly and Jaden Wilkerson, playing lacrosse on the school’s varsity team isn’t just about winning games.
“For me, lacrosse is not only a sport, but a way to express myself on the field,” Max says. “I feel that I am sometimes underestimated. When I play, I get a chance to prove myself.”
“Lacrosse means a lot to me,” says Jaden. “It’s played a major part in my life and will continue to for years and years.”
Yet for all the confidence that lacrosse provides the two 11th graders, as Black teens in a sport dominated by white boys, Max and Jaden agree that lacrosse can also feel isolating at times. “I was at a travel practice the other day and not a single kid looked like me,” Max says. “It kind of feels uncomfortable because it’s like I’m not supposed to be there.”
Matt Kelly and Aman Wilkerson – Max and Jaden’s fathers – are hoping to change that by tapping into Shaker Heights’ diverse community and attracting younger kids of color to the game, well before high school. As board president and vice president, respectively, of Shaker Heights Youth Lacrosse, Kelly and Wilkerson are leading the charge to expand and diversify the 15-year-old organization by eliminating the hurdles that have traditionally kept Black families away. Those hurdles range from the high cost of equipment to a lack of familiarity with the sport. So far, their efforts have already boosted the percentage of Black youth participating in Shaker Youth Lacrosse – which has traditionally focused on kids in third through sixth grade – from the single digits to about 40 percent in just a few years.
“Lacrosse has never really been a diverse sport, and that’s something that really drives both Matt and me,” Wilkerson says. “Now we have an opportunity to diversify the sport here in Shaker.”
“We have all the right ingredients in Shaker,” adds Kelly. “We have an untapped number of kids who haven’t been exposed to the sport. We have an infrastructure for the sport already set up. And we have very motivated coaches.”
A Passion that Grows with Purpose
Both men are passionate about the sport that has been part of their lives since they were little. Kelly played for his high school in the suburbs of Rochester, New York, and has been coaching his two sons’ teams in Shaker since 2015. Wilkerson, raised in Summit, New Jersey, played in high school and college and has been involved in lacrosse in some capacity, including refereeing, for more than 35 years.
Wilkerson cites lacrosse and diversity as two of the top reasons he moved his family to Shaker in 2021. In fact, he had started scoping out Shaker’s lacrosse community five years earlier on a business trip.
“I told my wife, I think I found a pretty cool town,” Wilkerson says. “Shaker checked off quite a few of the boxes on our checklist, with lacrosse being a major box to check off.”
Still, it hasn’t always been easy being Black athletes in a whitedominated sport. Like their sons, Kelly and Wilkerson were typically one of maybe two African Americans on the lacrosse field growing up, sometimes facing racial slurs from other players and even adults. But, they say, those incidents during their youth – and later as dads and coaches – never diminished their love of the sport. And now it drives them to push for change.
For Kelly, the real turning point came during one of Max’s travel tournaments in 2021. The tournament was not long after George Floyd’s murder by police and the protests that followed, and the jerseys for one of the opposing teams featured large “Blue Lives Matter” flags.
“We have all the right ingredients in Shaker. We have an untapped number of kids who haven’t been exposed to the sport. We have an infrastructure for the sport already set up. And we have very motivated coaches.”
“At the time it happened, we were still in the middle of the storm,” says Kelly. “It was certainly not welcoming to the few Black families and players there and likely just served to intimidate and discourage people of color.”
“It is certainly the ‘why’ of what drives me fundamentally when it comes to diversity in the sport I love so much.”
Soon after that incident, Kelly, Wilkerson, and other leaders of Shaker Youth Lacrosse started putting together a plan. First, it was decided, the program needed to get lacrosse sticks into the hands of kids much earlier. Youth lacrosse in Ohio has traditionally focused on kids from grades three through six. But where Wilkerson grew up – near Newark, New Jersey – youth lacrosse starts reaching out to kids by kindergarten. Soon after moving to Shaker, he started pushing for the same strategy here.
By last spring, Shaker Youth Lacrosse had launched a free “soft toss” program, designed to teach basic skills to boys and girls in kindergarten
through third grade and get them comfortable with a lacrosse stick and ball. Of the nearly 30 boys and girls attending the six-week program, about
one-fifth were Black. “Just being able to introduce the sport to kids as early as possible is the key to our long-term success,” Wilkerson says. “Our goal
is to use soft toss as the real mechanism to grow the sport.”
Another barrier has always been the high cost of equipment. To help tackle that, Kelly and Wilkerson turned to USA Lacrosse, the sport’s national governing body. USA Lacrosse has been helping bring the sport to underserved communities through diversity grants. For Shaker Youth Lacrosse that included 50 soft-toss sticks for younger kids and 20 full sets of equipment for the older boys and five sets for girls.
“It was a perfect fit,” says Matt Burke, the Midwest regional manager of USA Lacrosse. “We’re going to support them however we can.”
Shaker Youth Lacrosse also offers its own scholarships to cover some costs or guides families to youth sports scholarships through the Shaker Schools Foundation’s Level the Playing Field program. The goal is to make sure money isn’t the issue, according to Kelly.
“If a kid wants to play, they’ll play,” he says.
It’s Catching on for Boys and Girls
The efforts are winning over new fans among African American parents such as Darrell Hunter. Not that long ago, Hunter, the father of three boys and one girl ages 8 through 11, assumed lacrosse wasn’t for him or his kids.
“A lot of Black families are discouraged to be a part of some sports that they don’t see in their own neighborhoods, like lacrosse or hockey,” he says. “They don’t think they’re welcome anyway.”
Recent photo of Shaker Youth Lacrosse’s 3rd and 4th grade teams. SYL coaches left to right: Scott Shelfer, Aman Wilkerson, Track Malone, Matt Kelly, John Wallace and Scott Seiffert.
Then three years ago, his son, Darrell Jr., decided to play Shaker lacrosse to be on the same team with his good friend Mason Kelly, Matt Kelly’s
younger son. Before Hunter knew it, all four of his kids were playing lacrosse and recruiting their friends from other sports such as football and track.
“The coaches are positive and treat the kids like their own kids. All of the parents are involved,” he says. “They are doing everything they can to make
it a welcoming atmosphere for everybody.”
To ensure future growth and diversity, leaders of Shaker Youth Lacrosse have had to rethink the whole organization. Recently the group became a 501c3 charitable organization in order to apply for grants from USA Lacrosse and to better fundraise for all of its initiatives. It also has a newly created board of directors that – along with Kelly and Wilkerson – includes parents, longtime youth coaches, and representatives from the middle school and high school teams such as varsity coach Will Talbott-Shere, Shaker Class of 20Shaker Youth Lacrosse also plans to add girls’ youth lacrosse for the first time this spring with two new teams.
Previous girls’ teams in Shaker had been run by a separate organization that shut down during the pandemic. Kelly and Wilkerson also would like to eventually add boys’ and girls’ travel teams. Altogether, Kelly estimates Shaker Youth Lacrosse will have more than 100 boys and girls on its teams this
spring, up from between 50 and 70 during past years.
“We won’t see the real impact to the high school program for another three to five years,” says Wilkerson. “But we are building. And it feels good when we see new kids pick up lacrosse sticks.”
Max Kelly, who has helped his dad with the younger teams, sees the changes already taking place at the youth level and can’t wait for what that means for the future of Shaker lacrosse.
“I hope a lot of those guys stick with it all the way through high school,” he says. “And hopefully it changes what the team looks like so that it’s more diverse and represents the population of our city more accurately.”
