Behold the ‘Hidden Ball Trick’ Darien Lacrosse Players Used in the FCIAC Championship Game

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Lacrosse Vines tweeted Sean Bowley's video of the hidden ball trick played on New Canaan by Darien's lacrosse team

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For the past year, Darien High School lacrosse team members Rock Stewart and Ryan Cornell had been trying to perfect a hidden ball trick to fool members of an opposing team into thinking one player had the ball while another one got past them to score.

GameTime CT hidden ball trick 5-28-16

What’s missing from this picture? Only the ball. (screen grab from GameTime CT’s video)

Despite the practice, they hadn’t been able to actually do it in a game, the players told GameTime CT, a sports news website. That changed when Darien met New Canaan at the FCIAC championship on Thursday, and it contributed to the team’s 9-5 win.

Darien Coach Jeff Brameier said the “awesome” play was one “everybody will be thinking about for years to come.” The trick, captured on video, has already become hot on Twitter, with 1,100 retweets of this tweet by LaxVines (in 12 hours, as of early Saturday morning).

Brameier, quoted in the Darien Times, called Cornell and Stewart’s play “one of the best hidden ball tricks in high school lacrosse history.”

Hidden ball tricks are the type of play, according to the LaxLibrary.com website, that lacrosse teams should try only after mastering the basics. But Darien, with a 19-0 record, leading the state, just might be considered to have mastered those basics.

A 30-second video of Darien’s trick was posted to Twitter the night of the game by Sean Patrick Bowley, a sports writer and producer for GameTime CT (its the one LaxVines later retweeted, but the best and largest version accompanies Bowley’s article on the GameTime CT website). See the video here. One problem with hidden ball tricks is that cameramen covering the game will often get fooled, too, as Bowley notes:

Where’s the ball? At the 9-second mark in the video, you can just make it out in the netting of the lacrosse stick held by the Darien player on the far left, Rock Stewart.

In the play, viewers can see Stewart take the ball and touch sticks on the ground with Cornell, as if the ball were being passed. Cornell then acts like he’s got the ball, darting forward as New Canaan players begin to surround him. Eventually he seems to trip, keeping attention on him. When he comes up, there’s no ball there.

Instead, it’s already down the field. Look again at the video (9 second mark), and it looks like the ball is still in the netting of Stewart’s stick after he leaves Cornell. Stewart can be seen holding his stick up at the far side of the field as he moves toward the goal, and he’s soon off-camera. Compared to Cornell, Stewart seems pretty unobtrusive.

Stewart soon passed the ball to Colin Minicus, who scored for Darien.

The Hidden Ball Trick Elsewhere

Baseball teams also have hidden ball tricks. YouTube has videos showing the trick as played in lacrosse and in baseball:

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