I guess this goes under our new category of Rants and Raves, but it’s really more a post to get you to read about Andrew Goldstein, the Division I All American Lacrosse Goaltender who also happens to be gay.

In an interview to be shown on ESPN this Sunday during SportsCenter, Goldstein will tell his story, but I’ll tell you a bit more here.

To start, if you think that there are no gay athletes or that you wouldn’t want to be on a team with one, then I encourage you to continue reading because while I don’t subscribe to your viewpoint, I hope you are man enough to listen to the other side.

David Kopay, Billy Bean, Esera Tuaolo all are gay. Yet all waited until after their professional sports careers were over before they came out with their homosexuality. Andrew Goldstein is different. He is the starting goaltender (while he is graduating) on the Dartmouth College Lacrosse team and he is an All-American. He is also gay and he openly told his teammates that fact after the 2003 season. He was bold enough to write about his experience in coming out to his team in an online essay that appeared on Outsport.com which elevated his unique story to a national one. As Goldstein pointed out,

“All-American is what you think of, you know, the three kids, the white picket fence, All-American…And gay does not fit into that. So it’s nice for me to hear ‘gay All-American’ and to think it’s just the same as All-American.”

During his sophomore year, Goldstein decided to come out officially to his team and he started with teammate Matt Nicholson in the weight room. He went to Nicholson and told him that he had a boyfriend, a mutual friend they shared named Ethan. To his credit, Nicholson who was probably pretty shocked mustered a respectable, “Wow, man, he’s hot.” However later, when he really sat down and thought about the enormity of what his teammate had shared with him, Nicholson wrote in an emotionally charged email,

“I’m here for you, I’m your teammate. I’m your defenseman, and you’re my goalie.”

His teammates didn’t all accept him right away, but he soon went from showering by himself post-practice and post-game to being one of the boys again and just being plain Andrew. Then on May 11, 2003, Goldstein performed one of the greatest feats in NCAA Lacrosse Tournament history. With Dartmouth down a goal to the Syracuse Orangemen, Goldstein in his own words,

“I made the save and I saw a big opening on my left side, so I just took it and ran. I have two guys on me: One guy was an attackman, so he couldn’t cross the midline, so I got past him. Another guy was a middle, and he was right on me the entire time. They [the defense] didn’t slide, and then I got to about 8 yards and just wound up, shot low, and there it was. I grew up a Boston Bruins fan, so I did the little Ray Bourque, on knee with a fist pump. And everyone just kept mauling me, and all I kept thinking was, ‘Geez, I’ve got to go a hundred yards back to the net. Get off me. What are you doing?’…I thought to myself, ‘I guess it takes a gay goalie to have enough balls to sore in the NCAA Tournament.“

Its an amazing and inspiring story. You can see Andrew’s goal online here and there are two great articles on ESPN here and here. I encourage you to read more about Andrew.