Left to Right: Swarm head coach Ed Comeau, Jordan MacIntosh and Asst. Coach Sean Ferris
Story via Neil Stevens of Team Canada Lacrosse
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Jordan MacIntosh is a lacrosse star who, when asked what position he plays, says that he does not have one.
How can that be?
Well, he’s called a transition player.
“The best way explain it is that I really don’t have a position,” he says. “I play both ends of the floor. Typically, a transition guy starts on defense, transitions the ball to offense and sometimes plays a little offense. Basically, he’s kind of the buffer guy. He usually brings the ball from defense to offense and gives the offensive players the ball.”
He’s so good at it that he won the NLL pro indoor award for best transition play in 2013 and again in 2014, and he’s on Canada’s team that is trying to win a fourth consecutive world indoor championship. The game for gold goes at 4 p.m. ET Sunday.
Would MacIntosh not rather be an attacker hovering around opposition creases?
No.
“I feel that it is a little bit easier to score goals in transition because you get a lot of odd-man situations – three on twos, two on ones, breakaways,” he reasons.
MacIntosh used to be a forward – until his first year of Jr. A with the Burlington Chiefs under coach Shawn Cardy.
“Shawn put me in a transition role and that’s what I’ve played ever since,” he says.
The six-foot-one, 210-pound athlete from Oakville lives in Boston. That’s where his fiancée lives, too. He plays winter-spring for the NLL’s Georgia Swarm. They just moved to Gwinnett, Ga., from St. Paul, Minn., and he’s okay with that because it shortens his flight time to most games. He also plays for the MLL field lacrosse Rochester Rattlers during the summer. And he works a lot of lacrosse instructional clinics in both Canada and the United States.
Lacrosse as a full-time pursuit: more and more quality players are doing it even though the million-dollar salaries pros in other sports pull in are not available to lacrosse players, who don’t seem to care about that.
“I love it because, and this is a big thing for lacrosse guys, it is about growing the game and making it a more widespread game so that 10 or 15 years from now guys are making millions of dollars. I love coaching and teaching kids the game. That’s what I do.”
This is the second time MacIntosh has represented Canada. He was on the gold-medal field team in Denver in August 2014. He has made national teams because he is good. And he works at it. He trains five days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are weight-training days. Tuesday and Thursday are conditioning days, meaning lots of running.
“It’s just the love of the sport,” he replies when asked about his commitment. “I played hockey. I played other sports I was good at and probably could have pursued but there was just something about this sport that was different. I love playing. Money doesn’t matter to me. As long as I can support my family I’m going to keep playing.”
He will make use of his Rochester Institute of Technology degree in kinesiology at some point. That’s the plan anyway. But he just turned 26 last week so that is a long ways down a road that began innocently at the age of five when he was leaving a hockey practice with his brother.
“There was a lacrosse clinic going on and my brother wanted to go in,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to. I wanted to go home. He ended up going in and I ended up following him, and falling in love with lacrosse. Rob MacDougall, who is a legendary coach in Oakville, got me started. Anyone from Oakville around my age would know who he is. He’s coached a lot of players who are now in the NLL.”
And Jordan MacIntosh is one of the best.
