Welcome back to “I’m Curious!”

In the words of the indefatigable college basketball reporter Jon Rothstein: This is March. 

Another sports equinox is nearing. March Madness and the World Baseball Classic atop the home stretches of the NBA, NHL and PWHL, plus MLB and NWSL return? And NFL free agency?

Tons and tons of sports to come. I’ll probably have plenty on them.

But today, we go somewhere completely different, covering another sport entirely, one that is new to this newsletter.

As always, don’t hesitate to use the Table of Contents if you want to hop around.

Table of Contents

• The Most Curious Thing This Week: ...Lacrosse???

  • Meet Charlotte North: The Best in the World

  • California Palms Let the Fun Shine

  • Dream Job: Full-Time Lacrosse Still Just A Dream (For Now)

• My Reporting

  • MS NOW: The Surgeon General Nominee Loves Poop Milk?

• Something Good I Ate: I Lost My Appetite

But first… here’s Peach, my dog, and the mascot of this newsletter!

The Most Curious Thing This Week

It’s… lacrosse??

I’m gonna ask you to answer a question. Be honest about it.

Have you ever cared about lacrosse? Or even thought about caring about lacrosse?

No?

Well neither did I, until I actually saw it!

Lacrosse may have a reputation as a “rich kid” sport, with the “lax bros” probably being the absolute worst people in your class in high school.

But dig just a touch deeper beyond the stereotypes and there is a game that can actually be extremely fun to watch, with some delightful people who come together for love of the game.

For the second year in a row, the Premier Lacrosse League and Women’s Lacrosse League are holding their Championship Series at an indoor athletic facility in Springfield, VA, just 20 minutes from Washington, DC.

I have never seen, let alone covered, a lacrosse game in my entire life. I didn’t go to any games for my high school or college teams and maybe I’ve seen it for a moment while flipping through channels but it had truly never registered for me.

But I headed down last weekend to Springfield for some WLL action, and with just four teams in the women’s league, I was able to see the entire league play. Each team has 14 total players on the roster and represents a place, even if they don’t get to play games there yet.

Most of the teams had a decent chunk of players who were from or went to school in the area that matched their team’s location (so Boston had a lot of players either from Massachusetts or who went to Boston College, Maryland had a lot of alums of Maryland and Loyola, etc.)

The teams face each other in a round robin with the semifinals and championship unfolding this coming weekend. With this being the only active pro women’s lacrosse league in the U.S., this is the spot for the best of the best.

And watching them, I came to a pretty quick conclusion: I was missing out. And if you said no to that first question I asked you, you probably are too.

As it turns out, lacrosse has a reputation for being “the fastest game on two feet.” And with the WLL playing the “sixes” format that will be played as a demonstration sport at the 2028 Summer Olympics, they have found a version of the game that is even faster-paced than the traditional field lacrosse setup.

Plus, for the 2026 season, they added a 2-point line for goals scored from beyond 13 yards out. 

What it creates is a sport that is a fusion of basically every other sport in the American consciousness. There are sticks and swings like in baseball, six-on-six play with line changes and power plays like hockey, quick scoring, possession changes and a shot clock like in basketball, and the helmets and physical play of football. It has four quarters like basketball and football, and even has an offside rule, just like soccer.

It is a truly American game, not only in its blend of so many other American sports, but because of its roots in tribal games played by Indigenous nations in what’s now Eastern North America. Especially in the modern game, there is an explicit recognition of those roots—from the success of the Haudenosaunee national team tied to the tribe commonly known as the Iroquois, to the presentation of the Tewaaraton Award, named after the Mohawk term for the game that became lacrosse, to the nation’s best male and female college lacrosse players. 

The WLL even included a land acknowledgment to go along with the national anthem before their games.

And once those games start… BOOM! You’re shot out of a cannon. Goals get scored in seconds. There are hits and races for the ball. That thing is FLYING out of a player’s stick, either at a teammate as a pass or at the goalie as a shot on goal. And on a field roughly halfway between the size of a basketball court and football field, the game is crowded and fast. Really fast, actually.

Shots from pro women often come in between 65 and 80 mph and have been recorded as high as 95 mph. 

And that is a perfect transition to what I saw last weekend. Because that record is held by a 95 mile-an-hour shot that came out of the stick of Charlotte North.

Meet Charlotte North: The Best in the World

The 27-year-old attacker for the WLL’s Boston Guard is already considered one of the best women’s lacrosse players of all time. Possibly the best.

“She is, hands down, the best player in the world,” Guard head coach Laurie DeLuca told me.

North won the Tewaaraton Award twice and led Boston College to their first ever national championship in 2021. And everywhere she’s gone since then, it’s been a bonanza.

In her 2022 debut with Team USA, she led the team with 23 goals at that year’s World Lacrosse Championship.

In the league set up by women’s sports organization Athletes Unlimited, North led the league with 31 goals in her first season in 2022. 2023? She did it again, with 32 goals. 2024?

Well, second place finisher Izzy Scane scored 32 goals, matching North’s high.

But North?

She scored 50.

If the margin between North and second was a player, that player would have tied for 7^th most goals that year.

In the WLL last year, North did not lead the way in scoring, but she settled for… an even bigger prize, as the Guard won the league championship, with North scoring four goals in the championship game.

Off the field, North is quite the ambassador for the sport, regularly analyzing and explaining aspects of it on her YouTube channel and occasionally joining ESPN’s college lacrosse broadcasts as a color commentator.

There’s a reason that last year North ended up in a mob of people after a game, all hoping to meet her.

But what if I told you… that once the opening face-off came, other teams did not care?

The Boston Guard lost their opening game to the New York Charging 11-10, despite North becoming the first player in league history to score a two-point goal. 

Then on Saturday, when I saw the action, North and the Guard ran into the California Palms, who bested the Guard in their matchup 22-15.

“The best players in the world play here and there are phenomenal players on every roster,” North said after the loss to the Palms on Saturday. “It’s so unbelievably hard to make one of these rosters because it is the best 13 people in the world on these rosters.”

California Palms Let the Fun Shine

The Palms, to that point, have a star of their own often put on best player short lists: Ally Mastroianni.

A 27-year-old alum of the University of North Carolina, Mastroianni led the Tar Heels to the 2022 national championship over North’s Boston College squad. As a midfielder on the larger field in college, she brings both attacking and defending skills to the tighter format.

She has notched a team-high 12 points over the first two games of the season, with 5 goals and 7 assists.

And at many stretches of Saturday’s game, Mastroianni had the unenviable task of defending North.

The stat lines show a degree of success on that front, as North ended up with 5 points (4 goals, one of which was a 2-pointer.) Still a lot for most players, but a sign of North being fairly reined in.

It led North to tip her cap to Mastroianni postgame.

“She’s a great player. Great player on both sides of the ball. Phenomenal midfielder,” North said.

The Palms ended up sweeping both their games last weekend and are the only 2-0 team entering the home stretch of games and championship weekend.

And not unlike California native and Olympic gold medalist figure skater Alysa Liu, they are winning while having fun. Lots of it. 

“That might’ve been the most fun I’ve ever had playing lacrosse,” Mastroianni said. “And I think this team. We’ve been joking about it, like, describing our team as fun. We have so much fun off the field, on the field. Every moment that we’ve been here together has just been a joy. And to see everybody truly shine on that field was a really cool experience.”

Mastroianni drew on some of the work she has done with younger lacrosse players to point out that it’s a bit of a lesson for how to succeed in playing the game.

“We train a lot of girls and I think, sometimes people forget that lacrosse is a game and lacrosse is supposed to be fun. So I think the more that we can inspire these kids who are watching us to have fun playing the sport that we love, the better.”

Teammate Jill Smith, who made her pro debut Saturday and already tied the league record for most goals in a game with 7, shared a similar sentiment. 

“This has truly been like, one of the best weeks of my life so far and we’re only, what, six days in?” Smith asked. 

“It’s just been so much fun just playing with these people that I’ve grown up watching play has been like a dream.”

@womenslacrosseleague

WELCOME TO THE LEAGUE JILL SMITH 🗣️ #rookiedebut #wll #prosports #laxtok #womenssports

Dream Job: Full-Time Lacrosse Still a Dream (For Now)

There was one other game on the docket Saturday, between the Maryland Charm and the New York Charging.

In this one, Maryland played a game where they were steadily just a little better than New York. Ally Kennedy led the way with 5 goals while Grace Griffin (4 goals, 1 assist) and Ashley Humphrey (2 goals, 3 assists) also both totaled 5 points each.

It was another game where a team won by blunting the offensive output of their opponents’ stars. The Charm kept New York’s 2025 league-leading scorer Emily Hawryschuk and NCAA Division I goals record holder Izzy Scane to just 3 goals each.

It didn’t hurt that Maryland put up a whopping 39 shots, 32 of which were on goal. 

“It’s just one of those magical moments as an athlete that you just feel, like, dialed in,” Griffin told me postgame. “You feed off each other as well. Like, even, I think, I know I had some missed shots that maybe bounced off the goalie. But then, like, Ally Kennedy was there picking it up and getting the garbage goal.”

But there was one comment that Griffin made after that in the same answer that jumped out at me and pulled me straight out of the game talk.

“A lot of us work full-time jobs. And a lot of us are training on our own. We’re shooting on our own. So coming together and just seeing all of that pay off today, I think that really showed,” Griffin said.

At the moment, this is a reality of the league and the sport, especially on the women’s side. On the men’s side, where there has consistently been at least a few months per year of play for the last few seasons, the minimum salary as of 2021 was $25,000 and the league’s commissioner said last year that top players make over $100,000.

But while the men have a three-month season and an additional week of the Championship Series, the women have much less. Last year, they only played the week and a half-long Championship Series. And this year, they have added a little more, there will be one WLL exhibition game on eight of the 12 weeks of the PLL season.

So a week-and-a-half plus maybe two or three days of work beyond that. The league hasn’t shared WLL pay details yet but such a brief schedule is not exactly enough time to make a life out of pro lacrosse. 

I asked a follow-up question about that after Griffin’s comment and it was really interesting to hear what the players had to say.

“Thank God for our bosses and our work for accommodating us, but I think at the end of the day, it’s just a lot of hard work and sacrifice that has been put into this which makes winning so much sweeter,” the Charm’s Ashley Humphrey said.

And when Griffin gave her follow-up response, well… honestly, I’ve never really done this before but her whole answer was so good that I’m just gonna drop the quote here and end this part of the newsletter after it. I don’t work on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show in my MS NOW job, but I’ll steal his phrase here. Grace Griffin gets the last word: 

“We feel really, really blessed to be here and be able to play our sport that we love and get paid for it. The game is growing and I hope, years from now, there will be a majority of the girls that this is their full-time job. And I truly believe that the league can get there and they can support that.

But now, we’re in this phase where we can work full time. It’s amazing to see like, just these women that work really hard. And we have goals for ourselves and we hold ourselves to a higher standard. And if that means getting up at 5 am in the morning and going to training before you have to work your job to provide for your family, for yourself, for your future, that’s what it takes.

And that’s what I think really shows how many of us love the game. Like, what we’re willing to do in order to still play, perform at our best, to play for each other, I think this is a prime example of it.”

My Reporting

MS NOW

It’s always fun to go to work and learn something, and it’s also always fun to go to work and have a laugh.

After Casey Means had her Senate confirmation hearing as part of President Donald Trump nominating her to be Surgeon General, some aspects of Means’s history raised some eyebrows. 

Means is a disciple of the same anti-vaccine, often science-denying movement as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

But there was one particular aspect of Means’s rhetoric that is uniquely gross: she is a big fan of raw milk.

As a reminder, raw milk can be extremely dangerous and is nowhere close to the same as organic milk. Organic milk is just like normal milk, but it’s from cows that do not receive hormones or antibiotics and who get plenty of time to graze and eat off the pasture.

Both normal store milk and organic milk have been pasteurized. No chemicals or unnatural additives are added to milk in the process. It literally just means the milk has been heated to a high enough temperature to kill off potentially deadly bacteria and other contaminants.

One contaminant in particular caught the team’s attention when I pitched the absurdity of Means and her devotion to raw milk: poop.

Raw milk is not pasteurized, so it still includes live pathogens that a cow, or any human hands or surfaces involved in the process, touch as the milk heads from the cow’s udders to your consumption.

Means went on “Real Time with Bill Maher” in 2024 and, live poop be damned, evangelized for raw milk.

“I want to be able to form a relationship with a local farmer, understand his integrity, look him in the eyes, pet his cow and then understand if I can drink his milk,” Means said.

And did I mention that she dropped out of residency and does not even have an active medical license?

This may be the person advising the public on good health behaviors and issuing those warnings on cigarette packs and bottles of alcohol.

But hey, at least I got to help put the line “pet the cow and drink its poop” out into the world.

@jenpsaki

Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey Means is a big fan of raw milk, which is milk that's never heated to kill off pathogens and is at high r... See more

Something Good I Ate

You want me to write about food after hearing about poop milk?

I haven’t taken enough pictures of my meals lately, so I’m just gonna take an edition off.

I did go to Guerra Steakhouse in Arlington, VA, again, so if you’re desperate, just go back to Edition 38 and read about my last trip there.

Maybe that will help you get your appetite back after reading about poop milk.

Just a note: Any work here or opinions I express are solely mine, and do not reflect the views of my employer, my coworkers, or anybody else affiliated with me. The newsletter is not monetized in any way and everything in here is written and reported with my own resources on my own time outside of my working hours unless specifically noted otherwise. “I’m Curious” is just for me, the author, and for you, the reader. Thank you for reading. I’m glad you’re here.