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The last 20 minutes of the Archers Lacrosse Club’s final practice of its 2019 season looked different from a typical professional practice.
Players took off their pads, helmets, shirts, cleats and socks. They pushed the two goals into the far corners of the field. Short-sticks picked up long poles; defenders grabbed shorties. Head coach Chris Bates and assistants Tony Resch and Brian Kavanagh grabbed their sticks from the sideline.
That’s because, since he became a college head coach, Bates has reserved the last practice of every season to play a game of Baggataway – one of the original Indigenous forms of the game, played without boundaries or lines, for the purpose of honoring the Creator.
“It’s always resonated with me, honoring the game, understanding where the game comes from, how the game is viewed from a Native American perspective,” Bates said.
The inaugural season for the Archers Lacrosse Club ended unceremoniously. The club was one of four teams to make the playoffs, but it lost in the first round to the Redwoods (and lost Tom Schreiberto a shoulder injury in the process).
Because of the league’s alternative postseason format at the time, which included a consolation bracket played for the No. 1 pick in the 2020 College Draft, the Archers’ season wasn’t over when they were eliminated from the playoffs.
Following that loss to the Woods, the energy around the team was defeated. The Archers’ best player was out for the season. They’d lost their shot at winning the first PLL championship and they still had games to play. The pressure cooker of the season had left the team exhausted, physically and emotionally.
Bates knew it. So, he saw an opportunity to lighten their spirits. That pickup game of Baggataway helped the team rediscover its joy for the game.
“I thought it was a perfect moment for Bates to do it,” legendary former Archers long-stick midfielder Scott Ratliffsaid. “It’s one of my favorite memories of playing lacrosse, honestly.”
“We just had so much fun,” Ryan Ambler said.
That was hardly Ambler’s first game of Baggataway. Having played for Bates for 11 seasons across his college and professional careers, Ambler’s accustomed to his coach’s end-of-season tradition. The first time Ambler played Baggataway, in his freshman year at Princeton, the team’s starting goalie was beaned in the face by a shot and suffered a bloody nose before a crucial game the next day.
The injury risks aside, Ambler doesn’t remember ever losing a game after playing Baggataway in practice. He’s come to cherish the tradition every year.
“I always have a smile on my face, and I’m just constantly running up and down the field like a crazy person, either trying to score or get the net to save the ball,” Ambler said. “It just makes you feel like a kid again. It’s the best.”
The nine-year veteran grew up playing for his father, Bob, who instilled the nature of the Indigenous roots into his coaching practices. If a player on one of his teams, his son included, gave less than full effort, Bob Ambler would invoke the game’s history.
“Don’t you dare disrespect this game!” he’d shout, then proceed to give his team a lesson about why the Indigenous communities would play.
When Ryan was a senior at Princeton, Bates gave him his annual gift for seniors: a wooden stick carved and strung by the Mohawk Nation. It’s the same present Bates gave Ryan’s older brother, Colin, when the two were at Drexel. The stick is a treasure that Ambler keeps close to this day.
“You just look at it and you appreciate all that the game has given you, what it’s taught you, the people that it’s surrounded you with, the relationships that you form from it,” he said.
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Bates didn’t just give sticks to his players. Before his wedding to his late first wife Ann, he took a trip to the Tuscarora Nation and hand-picked sticks for each of his 13 groomsmen. Giving traditional sticks as gifts is something he loves doing.
“It reminds guys to honor the game and respect the game and understand what it means to be a part of a tribe,” he said. “[And to] have an appreciation for where the game comes from, that really it is a gift and it is a medicine game.”
Ratliff, whose father played at Maryland and whose mother has Indigenous heritage, has similarly appreciated the Indigenous roots of the game from a young age. His youth league in Atlanta was called Baggataway Lacrosse. But, until that afternoon practice in New Jersey in September 2019, he had not played that form of the game.
What sticks out most from that evening? At one point, he stripped the ball from Resch, his defensive coordinator.
“That felt good after getting yelled at by him all season,” Ratliff laughed. “It’s one of the core PLL memories for me.”
Ratliff grew up with his father’s wooden sticks, given to him by Indigenous teammates at Maryland, hanging on his wall. When Scott moved out of his parents’ house, he tried to take them with him. His dad, Randy, quickly objected.
“Along your journey somewhere, you’ll come to your own one day,” he told Scott.
It took until the year Ratliff retired, in 2022, for that to happen. While he was playing at an offseason tournament in Hawaii, he was awarded a wooden stick, made by Mitchell Brothers, for his career of service to the game. Like Ambler, Ratliff holds his traditional stick close.
“It is a prized possession for me,” he said.
Ratliff credits that game of Baggataway for lighting the spark that led the Archers to win the 2019 consolation bracket, which netted them the No. 1 pick in the 2020 College Draft. That selection became Grant Ament. Five years later in 2025, at Harvard Stadium in Boston, Ament, wielding Graeme Hossack’s long pole, and the current Archers played another game of Baggataway.
“There’s just something so freeing to playing and just using your legs and running and not calling a play, or having a shot clock, or worrying about offsides,” Bates said. “Guys come away with a smile on their face. You get to the essence of the game.”
For just the second time in club history, Utah’s 2025 season finale was a game without postseason or championship implications. Despite having nothing tangible to play for, the Archers rallied, beating the Carolina Chaos 24 hours after playing their annual game of Baggataway. They played to honor the game.
“Is that really why we’re here? To win the game?” Ratliff asked. “Or are we here because we’re playing the sport and sharing the sport, [because of] what it does to honor the Creator, and what it does to help us be at our best and heal from things in life?”
Bates and his players have done their best to continue honoring lacrosse’s heritage via both their play and their work in the sport. They’ll keep doing so when they face the Philadelphia Waterdogs this Saturday in Fairfield as part of the PLL’s Indigenous Heritage Weekend.
“If it’s not carried forward, those stories don’t get passed on,” Bates said. “That would be a huge mistake for our game. Our game still will hopefully always have those roots shared so that kids understand it.”
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