Every Wednesday, Ned Crotty takes the New York City subway from his Midtown job as an insurance client advocate to Chelsea Piers on the West Side, laces up his skates and takes to the ice to play in a men’s hockey league.
Mind you, he’s barely touched a lacrosse stick since retiring from the Premier Lacrosse League and leaving his coaching job at Duke in 2021. But this Wednesday night ritual — 7-8:20 p.m. at Chelsea Piers — has become a fixture in his busy schedule.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever pick up a lacrosse stick competitively again,” Crotty said. “But I love skating.”
Crotty, 39, is one of eight inductees in the Class of 2025 who will be enshrined in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame on Jan. 10, joining Matt Danowski, Christie Jenkins Kemezis, Crista Samaras and Kristin Sommar Jenney as those with “truly great player” as their designation.
All five competed in multiple sports throughout their high school careers, setting lacrosse aside for several months a year while they played basketball, football, hockey, soccer or volleyball — an all-too vintage notion for young athletes today.
“Whatever made me good at lacrosse, I learned from hockey,” Crotty said. “And vice versa.”
According to the Aspen Institute, the average number of sports played by children ages 6–17 has fallen to 1.63, a 13-percent decrease since 2019, down from an average of more than two sports a decade ago. They’re playing their primary sport year-round (10 percent) or nine to 12 months annually (21 percent).
More than half of parents feel some pressure for their child to specialize in one sport even though the risks of doing so (burnout and overuse injuries) are well documented.
Former professional football player and current NFL analyst Greg Olsen has drawn attention to the trend in recent months through his podcast and media platform Youth Inc.
Last week, Olsen posted an NBC Sports graphic that showed Nick Saban watching Drake Maye play basketball during a recruiting visit to Myers Park High School in North Carolina.
“Keep this photo saved to your phone and show the next person who says you have to focus on one sport in [high school],” Olsen posted on X.
Dear young athletes- keep this photo saved to your phone and show the next person who says you have to focus on one sport in HS.
The amount of kids I’ve heard say “I can’t risk getting hurt” or “my coach won’t let me” drives me crazy.
You get one shot to be a HS athlete.… pic.twitter.com/opPXnt3fdR
— Greg Olsen (@gregolsen88) November 14, 2025
The post has 3.5 million views. Crotty can relate. Then-Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler watched Crotty’s hockey games while recruiting him. Pressler told Crotty he loved hockey players because, “You can’t hide in the boards. If you want to know if somebody’s tough or not, watch him play hockey.”
Long before playing a key role in gold medal winners for the U.S. Men’s National Team, Crotty’s first clutch moment came when he scored the game-winning goal to lead Delbarton to the New Jersey state hockey championship as a freshman.
“In hockey, if you don’t play with your head up, you’re going to end up in a hospital. That was one thing I took from hockey to lacrosse,” Crotty said. “When guys are running hard, they’re looking down or they’re looking at their stick. It’s like, keep your chin on your shoulder. I had a lot of assists to Max Quinzani just from watching him pop open.”
Jenkins Kemezis had a similar recruiting experience when lacrosse legend Gary Gait showed up at her championship volleyball match.
“Volleyball is hype,” she told USA Lacrosse Magazine’s Beth Ann Mayer. “You’re in the gym, everyone’s hooting and hollering, and it’s fun.”
Pressler also recruited Danowski to Duke, having seen him play football as the quarterback at Farmingdale High School on Long Island. That’s less likely to occur today, said Crotty, who spent four years as a volunteer assistant coach with the Blue Devils and noticed club coaches dissuading high school athletes from prioritizing anything over lacrosse.
“Coaches are speaking out of both sides of their mouth when they’re trying to recruit you to the club level. ‘We love multi-sport athletes — as long as you never miss ours,’” Crotty said. “Lacrosse, one of the reasons why it’s beautiful is it brings so many different elements from different sports into it. The more you play different sports, the more athletic you are and the more you develop different kinds of athletic twitches or intuitions.”
Crotty was a defenseman in hockey. He idolized Brian Leetch and Scott Niedermayer as much as he did Johnny Christmas and Mikey Powell. It made him more versatile than most of his peers. He was an All-American at two different positions (midfield and attack) in college. His high school coaches required that he take a week off between hockey and lacrosse even though the seasons overlapped. “I hated that week,” he said.
“When I was playing lacrosse, I loved playing lacrosse. When I was playing hockey, I loved playing hockey,” Crotty said. “I’m an in-the-moment type of guy.”
One of Crotty’s signature moments playing lacrosse came in the 2010 world championship game, when as a 23-year-old rookie he scored the tying and go-ahead goals in Team USA’s 12-10 victory over Canada.
Afterward, veteran Ryan Boyle — who was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2019 — approached U.S. assistant coach Joe Alberici and asked, “Does he have ice in his veins or does he not realize it’s that big of a stage?”
Alberici, who would go on to call Crotty’s performance “one of the most clutch performances of all time,” replied to Boyle, “I think it was a little bit of both.”
Just like when it came to hockey or lacrosse, both was the right answer.
