• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

The great sport of lacrosse is having a media moment right now with a five-part docuseries coming to ESPN+ and a book about the game, its culture and its history that is getting rave reviews.

The docuseries comes from Peyton Manning’s production company, Omaha Productions, which produces ESPN’s “Places” series in which each episode covers a particular sport through the eyes of someone who knows it intimately.

The lacrosse series is “Rabil’s Places,” a tour through the world of lacrosse -- a community that has been expanding for decades, according to the show.

Our guide through Lacrosse Nation is Paul Rabil (photo above), 39, a former star midfielder at Johns Hopkins who played professional lacrosse for 14 years, the last three of them in the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL), which he co-founded with his brother.

“Rabil’s Places” is a very well-made documentary series from start to finish, and Rabil is a congenial and knowledgeable tour guide who knows and understands the game and its culture from every angle.

In the first opening minutes of the first episode which I previewed last week, I learned something I never knew before: NFL coaching legend Bill Belichick is as crazy about lacrosse as he is about football, and possibly more.

In the episode, Rabil meets Coach Belichick on a playing field where they chat about Belichick’s lacrosse history while amiably playing a game of catch with a hard rubber lacrosse ball and lacrosse sticks.

It turns out that Belichick, 73, grew up playing lacrosse all the way through college at Wesleyan. In his early career, he coached prep school lacrosse, and his daughter Amanda has coached the women’s lacrosse team at Holy Cross for 10 years.

While tossing the ball around with Rabil, Belichick reveals that he can still throw and catch both right-handed and left, which is a must for playing the game.

Belichick is on hand in Episode One because the episode explores the athletic similarities and differences between lacrosse and football, focusing on a handful of college football and NFL stars who excelled in both sports.

One of them is Chris Hogan, who was a lacrosse star at Penn State, but later managed to play football in the NFL as a wide receiver, including three years with Bill Belichick’s Patriots.

Subsequent episodes of “Rabil’s Places” will cover the evolution of basic lacrosse skills, the tradition of lacrosse in Maryland, the mystique of lacrosse goalies and, in the fifth and final episode, the history of lacrosse and its origins in Native-American culture.

Episode Five is particularly moving as Rabil visits Native-American communities in upstate New York where lacrosse has been played for generations and where it is believed the game was invented hundreds of years ago.

He even visits a workshop where artisans still make hand-carved, hand-strung wooden lacrosse sticks, a style that went out of fashion in the late 1970s, but is still in use in some indigenous communities.

Lacrosse fans and players both past and present will revel in this series since it is likely the first one of its kind, or at least the first one of its kind at this level of quality, to give this singularly American game the in-depth star treatment it deserves.

The premiere of the show coincides with the publication last month of “The American Game: History and Hope in the Country of Lacrosse” by sports chronicler S.L. Price.

The book and the TV series are unrelated, but they explore similar territory, particularly the game’s origins.

“Lacrosse is a sport of contrasts, with both a frat-house image and a rich spiritual heritage,” said a review of the book in The Wall Street Journal.

“The Haudenosaunee regard it as a form of ‘medicine’ and a way to ‘honor the Creator.’ In the end, it really may be America’s game, in all its glorious complexity.” 

“Rabil’s Places” starts streaming on Wednesday (June 4) on ESPN+.