53RD ANNUAL
VAIL LACROSSE SHOOTOUT program

My name is Nikki McClintock (née Soran - pronounced Sor-in, for those who’ve always wondered). I am the daughter of David (tournament director) and Kathy Soran. Niece of Jim Soran (tournament founder), and older sister to Matt (latest-appointed tournament director) and Joey Soran (associate tournament director). I’ve been attending the Vail Lacrosse Shootout my entire life and working at it for most of that time. Right now, I work as an associate director, which basically means I manage the website, help Matt get our requirements to the Town of Vail (mostly) on time, and keep my two young boys and/or dog from running on the field during their father’s or uncles’ games.

Our charismatic founder Flip Naumburg used to fill pages and pages of our program with prose about lacrosse and the community that comes with it. These works could be called rambling, and at times hard to follow, but if you’d been coming to the Shootout or had talked to Flip in person long enough, you knew what he was getting at. When Flip passed in 2018, he sadly took his musings with him. Our tournament program has felt weaker and much shorter ever since. This year, I feel compelled to try to fill that unfillable void. I won’t share any thoughts on the two-point line or the fault in sudden-victory overtimes like Flip would. Instead I’ll share what I know: what it’s like to spend your entire life going to the Shootout.

Recently, I needed some background noise as I tried to start my day. So, naturally, I selected a limited series documentary about cults. The allure of a cult and the people that join them has been a morbid obsession of mine for a while now. I’ve always wanted to know:

Why do these once sane people just uproot their lives in support of some vague cause?

How does a cause and its people become so compelling that you’re willing to work for free to further it?

How could you be so passionate about something you feel the need to entrench your friends and family into it?

Who would be crazy enough to agree to work for free with only the promise of some meals and maybe some matching outfits?

I pondered these questions as I drafted a social post on the Shootout’s account luring folks to the mountains of Vail for the annual pilgrimage and again later as I made updates to the tournament website. I completed these volunteer tasks and then reviewed our staff uniform items. I checked that my PTO at my completely separate paying job was approved and had informed my kids’ school they wouldn’t be attending for the next week and a half when it finally hit me...Wait… Am I in a cult?

The unpaid labor, the obsession, the impulse to drag whatever family or friends I could gather up I-70 every summer all pointed to “yes.” How did this happen? How did I get involved with something so deeply for over 30 years, with no end in sight? As is the blueprint for all good cults that plan to continue on, I was indoctrinated since birth.

My childhood/adolescence at the Shootout AKA Early Indoctrination

This nefarious gathering of cultists masquerading as a lacrosse tournament had been subconsciously converting me to their way of life since I was very young. Although I’ve been working for the Shootout in some capacity or another for many years now, I started as only a spectator.

My earliest memories of “Vail,” as the lacrosse tournament is referred to in our family, are of my father David packing up whatever used pickup he was driving at the time full of sticks, balls, goals, and cases and cases of Coors and speeding off to pick up Brian O’Farrell (another tournament director and one of his best friends since high school) to head up and get to work. My mother and siblings and I would come later, after the big circus tents had already been erected.

If you’ve been coming to this tournament long enough, you’ve probably heard us say that the Shootout is all about “family”. And although many of us who bring this circus to Vail every summer do share DNA or are legally bound in some way, we’re talking more about our chosen family. You know, like the Mansons did. This confused me as a child, and I thought Brian was my uncle and his kids, Kellie and Casey, were my cousins for longer than I care to admit. Even my son asked me last week if Kellie’s kids were his cousins.

The glimpses I got of the tournament in those early years were enough for me to know in my young heart that I didn’t want, but needed, more of it. I remember seeing my dad pack up a quick few items from the room he’d been sharing in a townhome in East Vail with Brian to join us in a hotel in the main village. Their only sleeping option had been a single bed in one room. Now, this was thirty years ago, but they were still not small men. Sharing that small bed was not an option. So, what did they do? Pulled the mattress onto the floor where one person would sleep while the other did their best to sleep on the box spring. You’ll have to ask them how they determined who got what.

Another early memory that looms large is when my dad was playing in the Supermasters championship one year. At this point, I was playing girls’ youth lacrosse in the spring, but the slow-paced game of catch with no protective gear (yes, I’m old enough to remember the pre-goggles era) bore no resemblance to the intense, brutal and dazzling game I was seeing before me. I don’t remember who the two teams were or if the game went into OT, but I know whatever team Dad was on lost, it had been a close one, and he was MAD. So mad that immediately after the final whistle, he smashed his Bacharach stitched helmet from high school into the ground with a force I’d never seen. The helmet exploded and pieces went soaring. I should point out that David Soran suffers from macrocephaly (AKA big a** head), which means helmets that actually fit him are hard to come by, and he is very reluctant to get rid of any.  I should also point out that displays of emotion aren’t out of the ordinary with my dad. The Sorans are known to laugh and weep openly with each other. But raw anger and disappointment resulting in a broken possession? This was new. Anything that got Dad this riled up deserved further investigation.

During the 90s and early 00s, the competition wasn’t only relegated to the field. I have a vivid memory of an army of teenage boys sprinting up the grassy ski hill from the base of Lionshead in their annual race. My boy-obsessed prepubescent brain short-circuited at the sight of dozens of older boys in khaki shorts and boat shoes competing like it was the first Grecian olympians. At that moment, I was gone. Sign me up for this nonsense for the rest of my life. As if I ever really had a choice in the matter…

During my preteen years, I finally started paying my dues. I began taking stats at the scorer’s table when I was 11. Apparently child labor laws do not apply at the Vail Lacrosse Shootout. Perhaps we’re exploiting some kind of mountain town mining-era labor law loophole, but that would imply we ever got paid. Regardless, I gave 110% at each game. I learned a new language. Words like “clear,” “slash,” “release,” “turnover,” “five hole” all had meaning and were now part of my vernacular. I wrote down every stat as precisely as if I was a court reporter. The other staff members consisted largely of Regis, Mullen and Santa Barbara and later CSU lacrosse players who had been duped into volunteering for the Shootout. Fun fact: The Santa Barbara staffers who played for Flip were once called the “Branch Flipidians” - in case you’re keeping track of the cult parallels here. These bleary-eyed lax rats regarded me skeptically at first, but embraced me once they realized I had 95% of the other staff beat simply by not being violently hungover and having legible handwriting. I also smelled ok and laughed at all of their jokes, which didn’t hurt. It’s worth noting here that I owe a debt of gratitude to the female staffers who came before me. Female staffers like Kellie O’Farrell and Tahlia Naumburg were on alert for dip spit receptacles disguised as normal soda cans and yelling at teams to clear the box long before I was.

The shenanigan years AKA Nikki indoctrinates her friends

I remained an eager apprentice over the next few years, pledging allegiance to the Shootout every summer, and even taking over the Chumash (youth 3V3) portion of the tournament when I was in high school. I mostly stayed an example staff member until I started bringing up a gaggle of friends and became yet another tournament liability.

For much of my high school years, you could find me flanked by my two blonde best friends, Sara and Michelle. As mentioned previously, I didn’t have a ton of peers at the Shootout, so I was thrilled when I was able to start bringing up friends to help out. The tournament was thrilled to have two more free laborers with legible handwriting.

During these years, my dad, Jim and Brian, and our families, rented a large house in East Vail. Sara, Michelle, and I shared a room with two twin beds, rotating who had a bed and who had to take the floor, a schedule that never really seemed fair since I found myself waking up on the floor or with Sara’s feet in my face on the bed every morning. It seems dicey sleeping situations with your best friends are a requirement for being a Shootout staff member.

Sara, Michelle, and I were skilled score keepers and skilled troublemakers. In an attempt to assert some semblance of authority, my dad continued to rent the house furthest East in Vail and hardest to get back to by bus. He also inflicted a near-impossible-to-meet curfew due to said bus situation. Uber was still a good ten years out, and cabs were out of the question since we had taken two weeks off from our summer jobs to volunteer and hopefully get invited to parties with lacrosse boys. Thus, we often found ourselves sprinting out of whatever random condo we’d found ourselves in to find the nearest bus stop. This became doubly complicated the year Sara had a broken ankle and spent the entire tournament hobbling around in a huge medical boot. I can still hear the yells of players out on their balconies cheering us on as we ran/limped down the street below in Lionshead trying to wave down the last bus headed east.

During the day, you could find the three of us cruising to the field or staff dinner in the purple ‘97 Camry I inherited from my grandmother while listening to one of our **Vail Mix** :) CDs way too loud. That is, until the car met its tragic end during our 2009 tournament. Michelle had borrowed my car after I demanded she run into town for some frappuccinos, as you do when you’re 18 and forced to wake up before noon, while Sara and I held down the fort at the Athletic field. After much time waiting and a couple of what I thought were prank phone calls from Michelle telling me she crashed my car, I walked down to the village and indeed saw Michelle next to a purple Camry smashed into the ballast of a bridge. She was surrounded by seemingly every fire truck and police car the town of Vail possessed, while she had her bloody nose inspected by Ryan the famous firefighter who won the first season of The Bachelorette. Apparently, one of our giant sugary drinks had tipped over in the carrier on the passenger seat, and when Michelle bent down to try to save it, she took the wheel with her and drove the car right into the side of the bridge. My dad was already on the scene doing damage control. No tickets were issued, and I suspect the noble protectors of Vail were just happy to have something to do that didn’t involve fake IDs or drunk lacrosse players peeing in alleys. Also, the town of Vail doesn’t skimp on architecture and the expensive stone ballast barely had a scratch. As for the three amigas, only our pride was hurt, and we spent the remainder of the tournament bumming rides and hanging our heads in shame. We spent the next few years banished to the loser’s bracket games in Edwards, where we were less likely to destroy public property.

My late teens and early twenties were spent recruiting more friends to come work for free. Friends who had previously never watched a minute of lacrosse in their lives, but had heard me evangelize about the Shootout enough, joined up with the promise of good times and a place to sleep in exchange for their time at the scorers tables. These same friends left with a robust knowledge of clears, penalty times, ground balls, assists, illegal substitutions and could tell why the ref had thrown a flag before he called it in.

Despite my crew of quick learners, we chose to stay relegated to the toilet bowl games. This was partly because we didn’t want the pressure of the important games, but mostly it was because it was hilarious. By the last day of the tournament, participants in these games were lucky to even show up with a jersey. On multiple occasions I’ve heard a player dig through his bag and exclaim, “Dude! That girl from last night stole my jersey!” For some reason, everyone in the toilet bowl is likely to lose their clothing or have it replaced by something ridiculous. One of my favorite exchanges came between a man on the sidelines playing in nothing but a jersey and bright red tights. If you’re wondering why, I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe a companion he brought back to his hotel the previous night stole his shorts and left him with only a pair of pants Santa Claus would wear if he danced ballet. A player for an upcoming game walked by wearing a t-shirt with a v-neck so low you could see his belly button. He looked Tights man up and down with a sneer and said, “Those are some red tights!” Tights did a once-over as well and immediately responded, “That’s a deep V!” Deep V looked offended for all of half a second before he looked down at himself and probably decided ‘Yes, I suppose we both look a little silly.’ The two men nodded at each other in a silent truce and continued trying to survive through the end of the tournament.

While I love the rush and excitement of an intense game where a championship or advancement is on the line, some of my favorite moments are when these swaggering athletes choose to stow their egos in favor of having fun.

I’m reminded of a game that seemed to drag on with no one wanting to play the full time. As is our duty as table staff, we suggested a running clock at half time, but the players had their own ideas of how to decide the outcome. What came next was a series of face-offs decided by rock, paper, scissors, a women’s style draw, a basketball-style tip-off, and a hockey-style faceoff. This somehow devolved into a braveheart where no one was allowed to wear pants (including the refs?), but the twist was that the attack players had to ride on the shoulders of a teammate, chicken-fight style. I couldn’t tell you who won or what teams were playing, but I can tell you that was the hardest I’ve ever laughed during a lacrosse game. 

Present Day AKA Nikki commits her family

While in college at the University of Oregon, I wanted to keep my skills sharp, so I volunteered for the men’s lacrosse team as a stats keeper. I soon met a cute defender on the team who was also, very conveniently, from Denver. We hit it off, even though he’d gone to Cherry Creek High School, which is a cardinal sin in the Regis Lacrosse-obsessed Soran house, and we started dating a few months later. That summer, I insisted he accompany me to Vail for at least a couple of days. I framed it as a fun mountain trip with lacrosse thrown in, but really it was a test to see if he could hang, because if he couldn’t survive the Shootout, we could never survive as a couple. Luckily, he passed with flying colors. Fast forward eight years, and we were married in the only place we could imagine: Vail.

In the 15 years since, Jamie’s come to every Shootout, both as a staff member and a player. Even the year after suffering a tragic hamstring tear thanks to an ill-advised attempt at water skiing, he gritted through PT and workouts to get back in “Vail shape.” When he’s not on the field, Jamie’s using his skills as a TV producer to run and evolve the live stream of our games or using the knowledge gained from his MBA program to improve our apparel shop or performing whatever manual labor my dad and brothers have roped him into.

In keeping with tradition, our two and five year old sons have come to every tournament since birth. Our oldest is already an official staff member whose credits include carrying scaffolding pieces, blowing the horn at the end of games, and “parking lot duty.” It’s been heartwarming to see this tradition carry on and have my children embraced by our extended staff “family.” Kids I once babysat now babysit for my kids. If I don’t know where my kids are in Vail, I don’t stress because I know they’re either riding around on a golf cart mission, hunting snakes, playing catch or getting a refreshment with people I trust and love. 

I’ve depicted a fairly rosy picture of the Shootout, but it’s not without its challenges. As I’m sure is common among cult members, I often wonder “Why the hell do I do this?” I succumb to a  stress-induced sobbing breakdown at least once a tournament and feel a soul-crushing guilt whenever one of my kids gets a sunburn or misses a nap or I sneak away from them to go make urgent updates to scores or try to finish a long-winded article about how much I love this event. These feelings all tend to disappear when I stop to breathe and look at the maple-leaf snow of the Gore range, because I know that anything you love this much is going to try you. And because I’ve been brainwashed.

So, if this truly is a cult, hand me some matching Nikes staff shirts and Kool-Aid a Coors Light.