The Premier Lacrosse League is taking a stripped-down, pick-up version of the sport to the streets of Los Angeles. On Saturday, Nov. 14, the league’s Street Lacrosse Pro Tour makes its first L.A. stop, on the basketball courts at Venice Beach, with a festival vibe and a 5-on-5 format that looks more like street basketball or hockey than the field game.
The goal is to keep growing the sport and build buzz before its long-awaited return at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, about 600 days away. Lacrosse last appeared as a medal sport in 1908. It has appeared since only as a demonstration sport, including at the 1932 L.A. Games and, most recently, in London in 1948.
Men’s and women’s pros will share the court with special guests, including streetball star The Professor and influencer Cameron Elliott Schmidt.
Paul Rabil, widely regarded as one of the best players in the sport’s history, co-founded the PLL and its sister circuit, the Women’s Lacrosse League (WLL). He is president of the parent company; his brother, Mike, is CEO. In June, the league closed a $100 million Series E led by Ares and Joe Tsai, with ESPN taking a minority equity stake.
Rabil, who has previously shared his leadership playbook with Fortune, sat down with us to discuss the Street Lacrosse Pro Tour and the sport’s state in the run-up to the Olympics.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Street lacrosse as a pickup-game pipeline
Fortune: Lacrosse has grown quickly this century, well beyond its traditional hotbeds in New England and along the East Coast. Since 2000, the number of NCAA lacrosse programs has more than doubled to 917, while high school participation has increased by more than 353%. In 2024-25, 212,988 high schoolers played on 6,670 boys’ and girls’ teams nationwide.
Team lacrosse has surged. So how does the Street Lacrosse Pro Tour fit into the PLL portfolio?
Rabil: We’ve done a lot with our Assists program, our 501(c)(3). We donate equipment, provide coaching opportunities, and playing opportunities for kids who otherwise don’t have access.
Street Lacrosse came [in 2023] when Rich Kleiman and Kevin Durant invested in the PLL. Kevin and I grew up in the DMV [the Washington, D.C., area], and we both played hoops, so we knew you had to play pickup to get better as a player. That was always around and available for basketball, but a sport like lacrosse, that’s not always available to you.
So street lacrosse was born—basically playing a version of lacrosse on a basketball court. All you need is a stick and a tennis ball, no helmet, pads, and all that other stuff.
We felt like if we could lift off Street Lacrosse, get the pros to play it, create a ton of exciting media around it, that would start penetrating the subconscious of a young kid who wanted to try lacrosse and not worry about signing up for a rec team or club team.
Ultimately sport should be egalitarian. If anyone wants to try something, they should be allowed to try it, and if they fall in love with it, they can commit to playing it and potentially pursue a life in it.
Growth capital and a bet on the mainstream
Fortune: Both pro field leagues, which play 10 a side, just finished strong seasons. The PLL posted its most-watched season ever in its eighth year, and the WLL set women’s pro attendance records in its inaugural season. Where does the next leg of growth come from?
Rabil: We’re in a territory where professional lacrosse has never been, and that’s exciting. We’ve raised our Series E around the prospect of having growth over the last eight seasons, and now we’re pouring on growth capital to potentially take the next step into the mainstream spotlight of where the big five or six sports live.
We have a major media deal with ESPN, they’ve invested in our league [in the Series E round], and we have title sponsors across the major categories that never touched lacrosse in the past. That’s because we have real distribution of viewership [on ESPN and sister network ABC], our audience is highly sought after—families and younger generations—and we have a built-in production team that creates content that’s bespoke on behalf of our players, teams, and our partners.
We’re in the middle of producing a five-part documentary series with ESPN [releasing next spring]. I like to say we’re a league and a media company, which has been our focus since we raised our first dollar.
Fortune: All PLL and WLL teams are owned and operated by the leagues. Are you considering expanding, or bringing in individual owners like in other team sports?
Rabil: Because we own the whole thing, it makes less fiscal sense to expand in the PLL 1794580623… There’s room for expansion of the WLL from four teams up to eight, same as the PLL, but no plans right now that I can announce.
Lacrosse being back in the Olympics in 2028 is a very attractive time for a big shift in our operating model [to possibly selling teams to individual owners].
Fortune: What’s your biggest challenge at the moment?
Rabil: It has to be getting people to decide in today’s environment to pay for a ticket, drive to a game, pay for parking, show up in the heat of the summer for a game broadcast on ABC at one o’clock. That’s a challenge for any league, but lacrosse, in my point of view, outside of the college Final Four, has never really conditioned its fans to attend games.
This is the best lacrosse I’ve ever seen in my life, but conditioning a fan from scratch is a journey. We’re eight years into that journey and seeing a lot of success, but it takes a long time to condition human behavior.
Rabil’s advice to league founders: dig deep first
Fortune: What’s your advice to someone starting a sports league?
Rabil: You have to understand the attention economy if you’re trying to grow an otherwise niche sport. You have to do a lot of things really well: education, storytelling around athletes, community investment of your teams, and you have to be omnipresent across mobile devices and televisions, and video boards.
You should approach your business, and find the right investors, metaphorically to think that you’re building a New York City skyscraper. That means you have to dig really deep into the ground first, which comes at an unattractive P&L, but that gives you a strong enough foundation to build upward.
People look at the skyline and say, ‘How beautiful is that!’ They don’t understand the structure that lives underneath it and the investment that went underneath it. It’s a long game.
If you’re starting a football, baseball, basketball, or hockey league, my advice is basically: don’t do it!
Building toward a U.S.-Canada final in L.A.
Fortune: The PLL and WLL are helping stage the first Lexus Global Lacrosse Games, a new international tournament set for Dec. 8-13 outside Washington, D.C., to build toward the Olympics. It will include men’s and women’s national teams from lacrosse powerhouses the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the Haudenosaunee, who originated the game centuries ago.
Rabil: The ’28 Olympics are an incredible opportunity for our sport and our players. It’s one the sport has never had.
We’re setting up a version of the 4 Nations Face-Off tournament the NHL had that built momentum around the USA and Canada through the Winter Olympics. Over the next two years we’re going to try and build as much attention and awareness around international lacrosse so that when summer 2028 comes in LA, people will be champing at the bit to see a U.S.-Canada final.
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