Lacrosse is one of those sports that can look pretty extraordinary, even when it’s being played in a completely ordinary way. The truth is, it’s all in the stick. With most sports, the default action is something that anyone can do — dribbling a soccer ball, carrying a football — but many people wouldn’t know the first thing about cradling a lacrosse ball. And when the players pull out a sick trick shot to score a goal? Even better.

Here are five of the most awesome lacrosse goals we’ve ever seen.

80 Yard Shot

A lacrosse field is 110 yards long, but unlike football and soccer, the goals aren’t exactly at the ends of the fields — you can play behind the goals a little ways as well as in front of them. So, this defender launching the ball from behind his own goal isn’t shooting it the entire 110 yards, but he’s coming pretty close. He manages to hurl the ball and keep it exactly on point directionwise for 80 yards and it goes straight into the goal. Defenders always have long sticks to keep their attackers at bay, and in cases like these, make for great catapult-like launchers.

Hidden Ball

It’s the old hidden ball trick. One player wanders over to another, very casually, as though to flip him the ball. The new player acts like he got the ball when he, in fact, did not. He cradles it toward the net while the first player, still with the ball, launches a long distance shot to catch the goalie unawares. The strategy works perfectly here, even faking out the cameraman, who follows the second player even while the first player is launching his shot. Success can be attributed to the fact that there are no players on the other team nearby the ball carrier at the time of the handoff. If they had been playing tighter defense, the goal probably wouldn’t have happened.

Behind The Back Flip

The player here combines a couple different tricks into a shootout goal. First, he wedges the stick behind his back, changing his grip to most easily facilitate this style of holding the stick. Second, he flips, which is totally unnecessary and uninvolved in actually scoring on the goalie, but completely awesome nonetheless. This is a play you shouldn’t try to replicate unless you have a long history of gymnastics success and considerable confidence in your stick skills.

Mid-Fall Shot

Here, a player is sent flying and looks like he’ll end up past the goal and unable to put a shot on it. Instead, he whips the stick around the back of his head, shooting the ball behind his back as he falls to the ground. Of course, the goalie is playing the front of his body, which is where you generally expect the shot to come from, so just by putting his strike on goal he pretty much guarantees that he’ll score. Shots like this are mostly difficult because they’re launched blind and its incredibly hard to make the ball actually go toward the goal when you’re falling away from it.

Goalie As Shooter

This video has a surprise ending. No trick-shot compilation would be complete without a goalie goal, and so here is the white team’s goalie taking the ball upfield himself. Goalies in lacrosse play with very wide-netted sticks that make it incredibly difficult to keep the ball from getting batted out, so they generally don’t hold it for too long. But after the defense spreads, the white goalie takes it himself, shooting from close distance. The blue goalie makes the save, though, and immediately fires a shot from his own crease, scoring on an empty net. The whole time, you thought the white goalie was going to score, but in the end, the tables completely turn.

Cover Photo Credit: vamentor – flickr.com