Reflection
When starting this project, I was extremely stuck on what path to take. I decided to create something about what I know best, lacrosse, which is ironic considering I only used other people’s work. I made a playbook based completely on other people’s plays. In lacrosse, if you have a good play, that can be the difference between a win and a loss. Plays are scouted and learned by opposing teams’ defenses. It is quite contradictory because when a play proves valuable and goals are generated, the play is used again. Because the play is popularized by a team, other teams can easily identify it and attempt to guard it. Ultimately, teams want to keep their plays close. By taking plays from other teams, it breaks down their offense. I arranged the plays into a playbook, something that can be found in most lacrosse players’ backpacks. My purpose was to build a goal-generating offense from entirely other schools’ plays.
I was not random in my selection of plays. As someone who has watched hundreds of hours of lacrosse and played even more, I know many plays. Lacrosse coaches instruct their players to watch elite teams’ games to draw inspiration and learn. The plays I selected come from winning teams. “Circle” from Syracuse University and “Gator” from the University of Florida come from teams that are consistently top-ranked and make Final Four appearances. “Motion” comes from the University of Tampa, which has won two consecutive national championships. “Slow Break” builds and settles the offense while generating goal-scoring opportunities. From there, the offense can transition into “Circle,” “Gator,” or “Motion.” “77” works differently. It gives the offense more opportunities for creativity, which is essential for improving a player’s attacking skills. Together, those five plays build a successful, high-scoring offense.
This playbook is not plagiarism. Each play, at face value, is directly copied from another team’s offense. However, these plays, carefully curated, create a unique offensive approach that does not occur if the plays are used alone. In the field of lacrosse, it is common practice to draw inspiration from other teams’ plays. However, deriving an entire offense from another team’s offense would be highly frowned upon, especially at the collegiate and professional levels.
This project also connects to Kyle Chayka’s “Style Is an Algorithm” because my playbook shows how something new can be created from ideas that already exist. Rather than inventing completely new plays, I selected plays I had seen from different teams and combined them into one offensive system. Like Chayka’s discussion of how style can be influenced by existing patterns and ideas, my playbook reflects how creativity can come from selecting and reorganizing existing work. The individual plays are not my own, but the way I chose and arranged them reflects my own knowledge of playing lacrosse.
Ultimately, this project changed how I think about originality. I initially thought the most interesting part of the project would be creating an effective lacrosse playbook. Instead, I realized that the process of creating the playbook was really about selection, combination, and transformation. I used other teams’ ideas, but my knowledge of lacrosse determined which ideas I chose and how I connected them.