In what has to rank as the least surprising sporting result this year in the world of sports as we know it, the United States women’s lacrosse team wrapped up the gold medal in the 2025 World Games in Chengdu, China with a 16-8 win over Canada.
The win gave the States a measure of revenge over the Maple Leafs, who beat the United States three years ago at the last World Games event in Birmingham, Ala.
The tournament and its results have yielded a number of hot takes, which follow below:
Unlike three years ago, the United States didn’t bring a second-level side to the World Games. The 2022 World Games took place only a few days after the World Lacrosse World Championship, and two separate rosters were formed for these two tournaments. Canada, on the other hand, had a lot of overlap between the two tournaments, and their senior field lacrosse athletes were phenomenal in the tournament.
The results of this competition are a bit stunning for me because of the level of play of some of the teams. Australia had to make an enormous comeback in the last four minutes of play to draw level and get to overtime.
England, a team which was the best lacrosse nation on the planet 50 years ago and has always been amongst the best in the world, didn’t make the medal round this tournament, a pretty stunning development.
I think the one non-North American team that made the biggest impression was Japan. The Suns had the amazing pair of Negai Nakazawa and Kororo Makazawa, two talents who have honed their skills at the University of Louisville. They were really fun to watch.
In terms of national-team play, has anyone had a better recent string of results than Charlotte North? She now has a 2022 World Championship winner’s medal, a 2024 World Box Lacrosse championship, and now, a World Games title in the Sixes discipline.
North wasn’t a captain for the U.S. team, but she was the loudest player in the huddle during timeouts and water breaks. She’s going to be a great leader for this U.S. program for as long as she pulls on a U.S. kit.
Oh, and she had 16 goals and 13 assists for 29 points, second on the team.
Leading the U.S. team in points, however, was the veteran captain Marie McCool. She ran amazing snowbirds over the course of the tournament, and would score 20 goals and 12 assists in the tournament.
Another player who excelled on the attack end for me was the one U.S. player who didn’t have her name on the back of her jersey: attacker Ellie Masera. She was the one player on this World Games team who was also on the silver medal-winning World Games side from three years ago, and she played like she was on a mission.
The U.S. side was a lacrosse “Dream Team,” which also included the current Tewaaraton Trophy winner, Chloe Humphrey. She had 13 goals for the States in this tournament, and an unforgettable score at the end of the third quarter against Czechia.
On the play, Taylor Moreno put the ball into play as the clock ticked down to under 10 seconds remaining. She launched an outlet pass to McCool, who looped a through pass to Humphrey, who had her back to the goal.
With time winding down, McCool lowered the head of the stick and whipped the ball towards the cage between her feet and past the Czech goalie.
¡Golazo!
The World Games women’s Sixes tournament consisted of 18 games.
I’ll be blunt here: most of these were blowouts. Only two games finished with a margin of victory of fewer than five goals. Two.
One of them, however, was a rollercoaster of a match between Japan and Australia for the bronze medal. Japan had a three-goal lead with 4:39 left in regulation, but Australia got goals from mim Suares-Jury, Stephanie Kelly, and Georgia Latch.
During that comeback, Japan had a chance to stanch the bleeding with a great scoring chance off the stick of Nozomi Tanaka, only to have the shot waved off, and the umpire reached into the back pocket to pull out a red card.
You might have seen this before in other forms of Sixes play, where the onus is on the player to shoot safely, as there is no shooting-space call in Olympic rules. But this was a critical call, one which gave Australia a two-minute power play with 2:01 left in regulation.
That was compounded by the fact that Negai Nazakawa was given a green card in the final seconds of regulation. The resulting power play, leading into overtime, resulted in Latch’s goal that won the bronze for Team Koala.
The Tanaka red card wasn’t the only one in the medal round. Canada, in the second minute of play of the gold-medal match, saw forward Jordan Dean sent off for hitting a U.S. player with a shot at goal. In a tournament with only 12 players on a roster, losing a player for the rest of the game is, for me, a harsh, if not Draconian, turn of events.
Maybe this is a rule that World Lacrosse needs to examine in the years before the Olympics?
