Association) was founded. Belmont Park's mile-and-a-half main track is the longest dirt Thoroughbred race course in North America, and it has the sport's largest grandstand. Belmont Park hosts the Belmont Stakes, an American Grade I stakes Thoroughbred horse race held each June. The Belmont Stakes is the third leg of the Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in the United States. Lacrosse Long Island seems to have a vast amount of elite lacrosse talent and the ability to develop top players. If you hear about a great lacrosse player, chances are that player has ties to Long Island. In 2002 more than one-third (4 of 11) of the players on the NCAA Division I All-American First Team came from Long Island high schools, with 16 Long Islanders honored overall. In the same year, the NCAA Division II All-American list was virtually all Long Islanders and nearly every NCAA Division I, II and III lacrosse team had at least one player from the area. In 2002 at the NCAA Division I championships, three of the four men's teams were coached by a Long Islander and all four had a Long Islander as a captain. By some accounts, lacrosse was almost as big as baseball in New York City in the first decade of the 20th century. After learning the game in New York City and moving to Long Island, Jason Stranahan started the first high school lacrosse program at Manhasset High School in 1933; football Hall of Famer Jim Brown played lacrosse at Manhasset and is considered by some as the greatest lacrosse player of all time. By the 1950s, the sport was embedded across Nassau County but had still failed to reach Suffolk County. Huntington High School fielded that county's first varsity team in 1957. In the 1960s, there was a large migration to Long Island which resulted in high schools hiring a sizable number of teachers and coaches that coincidentally had college lacrosse backgrounds and the desire to build powerful programs. The New York metropolitan area was home to a Major League Lacrosse team called the New York Lizards, formerly the Long Island Lizards, before that league merged with the Premier Lacrosse League in December 2020. The PLL plays a tour-based schedule, visiting a series of American and Canadian cities where the sport enjoys significant popularity; currently, the league's New York-area stop is Red Bull Arena. The New Jersey Pride,