High School Lacrosse - Game 1 of the year.

Growing up I played many sports, some of them being football, basketball, and even 10 years of roller hockey (we don't have ice in Florida), but my favorite sport that I played was lacrosse. Unfortunately for me, I only played 2 years in high school and being a slow runner, I wasn't the amazing at it, but I was decent enough to get some playing time and a few goals during my career, and still play mens league on occasion now.

In the city that I am from we have four high schools in the area that have teams, and the high school that I was lucky enough to go to, was and is by far the best in the district at lacrosse. Overall, as a school we have won districts at lacrosse 11 out of the 14 years that the school has had lacrosse, with each of the other schools winning once. You could say we dominate almost every year, like last year we won our district finals game 17-2. This year may tell a different story.

I still love watching lacrosse and I'm lucky that I have a little brother that is in high school and I get to watch him play at my old high school now. This year is his freshman year, and he made varsity. Tonight was their first game, and I was very excited to see how we would stack up against our cross-state rivals from Gainsville. In our history against them we definitely have gotten the better of them the majority of the time, coming into this game we are up in the rivalry 9-2.

Thinking that this was going to be like any other year, I was excited and showed up early to the game to catch some of our warm ups. Getting there I noticed we looked a lot smaller than normal, and I don't mean just how many people we had, but our size too. As it turns out we lost 8 KEY players from last year, 4 to graduation and 4 unfortunately because of our head coach. For what ever reason, the AD at our school thought it would be a good idea to hire a 23-year-old coach that knows nothing about coaching. Turns out he has already made enemies and because of this, 4 of our starters for the year did not come back. This leaving us with 1 senior on our roster, and 1 junior. The rest of the team being in 10th-8th (yes 8th) grade.

To keep the game recap shorter than the rest of the story, it was bad early and often in this game. We ended up losing 18-1 as you can see from the picture above. We struggled with almost every aspect of the game and just couldn't match their speed with 3, 8th graders and 4, 9th graders playing the majority of the minutes. It's going to be a long, hard year of lacrosse, but we should still win districts!