Alf Jacques

Alfred Warner Jacques, known as Alf Jacques, was an American lacrosse player and Native American craftsman, born in Syracuse, New York, on March 2, 1949, and died on June 14, 2023. A member of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, he learned basket making from his grandmother and began playing youth lacrosse at five. With his father he built traditional hickory lacrosse sticks, and over his lifetime he produced more than 80,000 of them while working as a machinist. He played goalie for the Syracuse Stingers of the National Lacrosse League in 1974, later led the Onondaga Redhawks as coach and general manager to a Presidents Cup title in 2010, and was inducted into the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 2011 and the North American Indigenous Athletics Hall of Fame in 2024.