Staff Sgt. Adam Read, a training manager for the 31st Maintenance Squadron at Aviano Air Base, Italy, runs toward the goal during a lacrosse practice on base while Airman 1st Class Matthew Sersen defends. Read and five others from around the base play regularly, traveling to tournaments throughout Europe. (Russ Rizzo / S&S)
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy — Forget the lack of hamburger joints and muscle cars, Staff Sgt. Adam Read just wants a decent game of lacrosse while he lives in Italy.
It has taken some effort and a lot of networking, but he has managed to continue playing a game that remains a mostly American and Canadian sport.
Read, a training manager for the 31st Maintenance Squadron’s ammunition department, said he looks for games everywhere he goes. That didn’t change when he came to Europe.
“I carry my stick everywhere,” Read said. “It’s in my trunk now.”
When he arrived at Aviano, Read spotted an airman wearing a lacrosse T-shirt. It turned out the airman and two others he knew played regularly, Read said. They took Read to his first European tournament in Rome.
Since then, Read has traveled to lacrosse tournaments from Prague in the Czech Republic, to Cannes in France, in search of games. Many of the tournaments are for national teams that have rules about who can join, but Read said he manages to walk on wherever he goes.
“I always end up on some other country’s team,” he said.
Indeed, the 24-year-old bomb maker by trade has played for national teams from Italy, Spain and France, along with a lacrosse team made up of players from the Royal British Tank Brigade, he said. He’s currently a member of one of two lacrosse teams in Slovenia: the Ljubjana Dragons.
Read began playing in sixth grade and continued through high school and college, playing midfield, or “middie,” for the Black Bears of the University of Maine at Orono before joining the service.
His first European match came two years ago during an annual tournament in Rome called the Festival of Lacrosse. The tournament serves as a tryout for the Italian national team; Read made the cut. He played with the team last year in the European championships in Prague.
The Italian team got crushed in the championships, Read said, because many of the Italian players had never picked up a lacrosse stick before. Teams from Germany and England dominate because the sport has a longer history there, he explained.
The airmen who introduced Read to European play have since left, leaving Read as the main coordinator for lacrosse at Aviano. Some of the players liken him to a coach.
Read managed to persuade three others in his squadron to take up the sport and play with him in tournaments.
“He’s my supervisor,” Senior Airman Joseph Pogo said when asked why he played with Read. “It was a direct order.”
Two other experienced players joined the group, which now makes up half the starting lineup of the Ljubjana Dragons.
For Tim Morse, a physical education teacher at Aviano Middle School, lacrosse was the “one thing I missed about being out of the States.”
He jumped at the chance to play with the Ljubjana Dragons with Read and the others.
The level of play in Europe isn’t quite up to the collegiate standards Morse was used to as a goalie for Roanoke College in Virginia, he said, but “lacrosse is lacrosse.”
Plus, Read said, the road trips to games throughout Europe are about more than just playing a sport they love.
“We’re drinkers with a lacrosse habit,” he said.
Read travels about one weekend a month to play in tournaments — when his wife allows him time away from his daughter, Hannah, 4, and son, A.J., 1, he said.
Read said it has been an uphill battle getting enough people together to play regularly and hopes the sport will catch on at Aviano and other bases.
He is set to move back to Maine in July.
“I hope I don’t take the team with me,” Read said.
