By spring 1990, the lacrosse campaign had won at St. John’s Jesuit.

Brad Lay, a former college player who had started a club lacrosse program in Toledo, knew the sport had to expand to high schools to stay afloat, but the sport’s infancy here brought many challenges.

Athletic directors had no idea what lacrosse was, and more significantly, they wanted little to do with it. The other spring coaches, namely in baseball and track and field, feared lacrosse would take their athletes. There was no infrastructure, few coaches, and the equipment was expensive.

After promising the administration at St. John’s the boys wouldn’t kill each other by playing lacrosse, getting a team member’s father to underwrite the program, and signing on as a coach, Lay received the all-clear to start the program.

But another problem remained: No other school in northwestern Ohio had a team.

The Titans played schools such as Detroit Brother Rice and Ann Arbor Pioneer simply because they were the closest opponents.

“We had, like, a five-game schedule because there was no one else to play,” said Lay, now the coach at St. Ursula Academy. “There were very few teams at the time.”

Twenty-eight years later, times have changed. There are 150 boys teams and 141 girls teams in Ohio, and as of last year, lacrosse is sanctioned by the Ohio High School Athletic Association. Since 2005, 16 new school-affiliated teams have sprouted up in northwestern Ohio.

Clay High School was the most recent, starting boys and girls teams for 2018. Now that the OHSAA holds an official lacrosse championship, Clay aimed to start its programs before more schools join the party.

Coach Joe Kiss said the district floated the idea of starting lacrosse and was taken aback by how many people showed interest. More than 60 people signed up to receive information from the beginning, and the Eagles’ boys team has 27 players in the first year.

Further, 10 players are seniors who joined for their final semester of high school.

“I’ll tell you what was absolutely surprising to me, and that was the amount of seniors who wanted to come out,” Kiss said, adding the team’s crowds also have been consistently good this season. “Our community is so excited about lacrosse and the newness of it.”

The growth of lacrosse in Ohio has been apparent all the way up to the Division I collegiate level. Ohio State’s Nick Myers, who has been the coach since 2008, said the quality of the state’s high school players steadily has improved in his tenure.

Myers first began at Ohio State as a volunteer assistant in 2002, at which point the Buckeyes’ roster had only a few Ohioans per season. Now Ohioans are a foundation of the program. Eleven current players, two of OSU’s three captains during last year’s national championship game run, the program’s only first-team All-American, and the No. 14 pick in the most recent Major League Lacrosse draft all hail from the state.

As the sport grows, Ohio State hopes to keep the pipeline going in the same way the school’s wrestling and football programs do.

“That is absolutely the long-term goal and why my staff is so involved in the grassroots initiatives in Ohio,” Myers said. He added the Buckeyes’ coaches view it as a responsibility to grow the game in their state, and more infrastructure likely will lead to good things for the Buckeyes.

Although many children pick up lacrosse as high school freshmen, the area has made big strides in its youth development. Perrysburg, Anthony Wayne, Sylvania, and Ottawa Hills not only field boys and girls teams at the high school level, but also youth programs in their communities.

A generation of parents who knew nothing about their game now have their children playing lacrosse — not baseball or softball — as a spring sport. John Mehler, who coaches in Perrysburg, did not grow up playing lacrosse, but he saw a game in Boston with his wife when the two were newlyweds.

Now it’s what his family does in the springtime.

“We just kind of got roped in and loved it,” he said. “And away we went.”

Perrysburg Youth Lacrosse alone has 175 children from kindergarten to eighth grade in its program, a far cry from a generation ago.

Dr. Peter Koltz, who played at St. John’s and Indiana University and now coaches in Perrysburg, said the standard in the Toledo area has changed. In the late 1990s, he said, a good athlete with an elementary knowledge of lacrosse had a decent chance of being a regular goal scorer.

A 2000 graduate of St. John’s, Koltz had no youth programs available to him before high school. Now his own elementary-school children play, and some varsity players in the area are miles ahead of where they were a decade ago.

“Now we have freshmen at Perrysburg who are starting at the varsity level, and they’re as good as seniors and even college kids from back when I was playing,” Koltz said. “It’s incredible.”

As the interest for lacrosse has grown, the next step for the sport in Toledo is an increase in skilled instruction. Lay and Koltz said the area needs more former college players who return to coach, such as St. Francis de Sales coach Scott Loy, who returned to Toledo after playing for four years at Syracuse.

The increase in players has greatly increased the need for knowledgeable coaches and referees, Lay said.

“Now there’s more demand than supply,” Lay said. “The desire is there, the demand is there, but unfortunately the lack of coaches and referees is holding it down.”

What seems certain is lacrosse is in Ohio to stay.

Myers, who lives in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington, recently watched a practice with more than 100 children in just third and fourth grade.

For a sport that seemed glued to the East Coast for decades, the change is apparent.

“You would’ve laughed at me if I told you that 10 years ago,” Myers said. “It’s been really cool to see the way Ohio lacrosse evolved, and we’re still just scratching the surface, honestly.”

Contact Nicholas Piotrowicz at: npiotrowicz@theblade.com, 419-724-6110, or on Twitter @NickPiotrowicz.

First Published April 20, 2018, 8:42 p.m.