The U.S. Keeps Naming All-Star Teams. Canada Keeps Beating Them.
The sixes roster headed to Oshawa is the same mistake, made again.
On September 29 the U.S. men’s sixes team opens the Pan-American Sixes Championship in Oshawa, Ontario, outside Toronto, in front of a Canadian crowd. It’s the first step on the road to LA28. And if the roster USA Lacrosse just released is any indication, the program is walking in with the same plan that hasn’t worked yet.
The record speaks for itself. Canada took the gold at the 2022 World Games in Birmingham and the U.S. took silver. Canada beat the U.S. again at the Atlas Cup last September. Last month it was the field team’s turn, and Canada rallied late to take the inaugural Pan-American championship in Kingston, Jamaica. Different discipline, same result.
So look at the 12 names going to Oshawa. Two goalies, Entenmann and McNaney, both PLL Goalie of the Year finalists. Then ten field players: Carroll, Kavanagh, Mackesy, Sowers, Campbell, Kirst, Logan, Maguire, McAdorey and Weisshaar. If you follow the PLL, that roster looks like a highlight reel. If you’ve spent any time thinking about how to beat Canada in a 30-second-clock game with no faceoffs after goals and no poles, it looks like a problem.
Count the players who make a living stopping people. Danny Logan and Aiden Maguire. That’s the whole list. Campbell and Kirst are big enough to compete on that end. Kavanagh guards on motor because he does everything on motor. The other six are scorers first. Maguire was the college player of the year. Weisshaar went second overall in the PLL draft and leads the Cannons midfield in goals. Mackesy led this team in scoring at the Atlas Cup. The U.S. lost to Canada that same weekend.
That last line is the whole story. Sixes was built to produce goals. Thirty seconds a possession, everybody plays both ends, the ball changes hands constantly. When both teams get the same number of chances, the game is decided by who stops more of them and who wastes fewer of theirs. Canada understands that because Canadians grow up in a box. Nobody there gets to be a specialist. Their scorers guard, their guards can finish inside, and every one of them has been running a two-man game since he was ten.
The U.S. keeps sending the best open-field players in the world and betting that the talent gap in space makes up for the skill gap in tight quarters. Four years of results say it doesn’t.
Here’s where people get the fix wrong. The answer isn’t to drop a couple of short-stick defensive middies onto this roster. Sixes has no offense-defense substitution to hide them. Put a guy on the field who can’t threaten with the ball and Canada sags off him, plays five on four and lets the clock do the rest. What the U.S. needs is the two-way player, the one who can guard a Canadian coming off a pick and then go score. That profile is rare in American lacrosse. It’s also exactly what USA Lacrosse should have been identifying and developing since the day Birmingham ended. Instead, the sixes program has been a fall exhibition circuit for whoever is healthy after the PLL playoffs.
That’s the roster problem. Selection is driven by availability and name recognition, not by fit for the format. The U.S. is in the LA28 field as host no matter what happens in Oshawa, which is exactly why these tournaments should be a lab. Find out who can play this game. Build a sixes pool, not an all-star team. Reward players who guard. Get the box guys into the program, including the Americans who play in the NLL every winter. And measure the staff on one thing: results against Canada. Beating Puerto Rico and Mexico proves nothing.
The players on this roster didn’t pick themselves. If the U.S. loses in Oshawa, the question shouldn’t be why the best players in the world couldn’t win. It should be why nobody asked whether they were the right ones.
