Gannon Matthews: The First & Only Professional Lacrosse Player from Idaho

I didn’t know Gannon Matthews personally until we met in November of last year. Never coached him, never played against him, never even met the kid. But I knew his story, because in a lot of ways, it felt like “it could’ve been” mine.

Everybody I connected with in Boise about the game of lacrosse over the past 5 years had asked me if I knew him. They told me how he manifested his way onto Ohio State’s roster and turned himself into an athlete capable of changing the momentum of any game.

I knew I needed to meet this “kid” and see if he was for real. Clearly we had already had something powerful in common: the love of the game.

Then, out of the blue, I got a LinkedIn message from him asking to learn more about my company HDBND. It felt good to hear from him, so I passed my phone number along. We met a couple weeks later and got to know one another fast. Something clicked. 

Here I was, nearly forty years old, getting to know this young twenty-something man and every time I heard him speak, it felt like something I wished I had the wisdom to say when I was his age.

Quickly it became obvious to me that Gannon has the X factor every coach, GM, or business exec looks for in talent. So to me, it’s not surprising he’s making a name for himself as a pro.

I think it’s still surprising to others, however. The ones who don’t understand how a kid from Idaho made it to the league.

The Kid From Eagle, Idaho

Eagle, Idaho. Population 30,000, give or take. Twenty minutes from Boise. Beautiful country — foothills, rivers, the kind of place where you grow up playing football and baseball while snowboarding nights and weekends because that’s what everyone does. Nobody hands you a lacrosse stick in elementary school in Eagle. Nobody’s running fall ball. There’s no pipeline to a D1 program. There’s barely a pipeline to anything other than potatoes, semiconductors, and mainstream sports.

Gannon’s mom saw an ad in the newspaper for the Treasure Valley Lacrosse League when he was in fifth grade. A newspaper ad. That’s how this whole thing started. He and a buddy were quitting baseball at the same time, figured they’d try this thing called lacrosse, and that was it. Love at first catch.

I moved back to Boise years ago and saw the same thing happening around me — kids finding this sport through word of mouth, through flyers, through sheer luck. No infrastructure. No club system. Just a stick, a wall, and a hunger to get better. I know what that looks like because I lived it as a West Coast kid discovering lacrosse when the rest of my friends wer playing baseball or running track.

But here’s what Gannon did that separates him from the story you’ve heard a thousand times.

He didn’t just play. He committed. 

One D1 offer. One. Cleveland State. He took it and ran. Played two years, earned ASUN Midfielder of the Year, and used that as a springboard to transfer to Ohio State — a legitimate Big Ten program in one of the toughest conferences in college lacrosse. 

Not bad for a kid from a state that most East Coast recruiters can’t point to on a map.

And then came the moment that changed everything.

Big Ten Championship game.

Ohio State versus Maryland. Thirty-eight seconds in, Gannon gets the ball, comes straight downhill on a lefty dodge he’d been working on all week, splits two defenders, and buries it. First goal of the game. Ohio State’s first-ever Big Ten title on the line.

On the follow-through, Maryland long pole Will Schaller lays him out. One of those hits where you feel it in your living room. Gannon’s helmet drives into his mouth. Three teeth — gone. Blood everywhere. He switches jerseys and gets right back on the field.

He wore the number 208 on his helmet tape the entire time. Idaho’s area code. Always has.

Ohio State won that game. Won their first Big Ten championship. Gannon scored while literally losing pieces of his face, and then kept playing. If that doesn’t tell you something about what this game does to people — what it makes of people — I don’t know what will.

After graduation, he figured his career was over. 

Small-market kid, no connections to the pro game, no draft stock. Then the Carolina Chaos called. Supplemental draft pick. Showed up to camp, earned a roster spot, and on June 7th, 2025, Gannon Matthews became the first and only Idaho-born player in PLL history. 

He recorded an assist in his pro debut. Signed autographs for kids afterward.

The league’s a brutal business, though. Rosters are tight — eight teams and just a couple hundred players fighting for minutes. Gannon was released after a few games. Got the call just hours before a TV interview about his dream coming true. That’s the kind of gut punch that would make most people bitter.

Not Gannon. “I’m fulfilled with my career,” he told KTVB. “It was cool to break into some new water, especially being from Boise. Just happy for the state and where it’s going. It definitely cracks a door open for the next generation.”

And that door didn’t stay closed for long — the Utah Archers signed him for the 2026 season. The kid from Eagle is back.

This is what Grow The Game actually looks like. 

Not a hashtag. Not a marketing campaign. It’s a fifth grader in Eagle, Idaho, answering a newspaper ad, falling in love with a sport nobody around him plays, grinding through a path that was never supposed to exist, and then coming out the other side as the first person from his state to play professionally. 

It’s a cracked door that the next generation of Idaho kids will walk through because Gannon Matthews kicked it open with three missing teeth and a 208 on his helmet.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve written about the blue-blood programs, the five-star recruits, the guys who were born on the East Coast with a stick in their hands. Those stories are great. 

But this one? A kid from my own backyard, doing something nobody from Idaho has ever done?

This is the one that gets me.

Good luck this season, Gannon. You’ve got an entire State cheering for you.

– JB