Passing on the Love of Lacrosse

This past Saturday our team hosted a girls’ lacrosse clinic at Vassar. Around 25 girls showed up between the ages of 8 and 13 with oversized goggles sliding down their faces, mouth guards slipping out of their mouths and the biggest, happiest smiles I’ve ever seen. We broke them
down by grade and rotated them through our stations helping the older ones with draws and the younger ones with cradling and catching. The older girls were really enthusiastic and excited to learn new techniques and skills, and the younger girls had a ball having cart-wheeling and leap-frogging races for ground balls.

Our whole team was incredibly animated for these two hours and I think it couldn’t have come at a better time. We were all slightly dejected from a painful loss the night before and having 25 girls looking up to us, asking us for help, wanting to play with us was so gratifying and rewarding. The two hours came and want faster than any of us had expected and after complaining hours before about having to wake up early, we found ourselves slightly attached to our new friends and wanting them to stay. So bitter-sweetly we parted ways, asking them to
send us their game schedules, to come back next year, to practice their new skills all the time wondering if this experience actually inspired them to play lacrosse.

A few days later we received a thank you letter from one of the coaches of a few of the girls and a couple of the parents. Apparently a lot of the kids had gone home and started practicing what we had taught them in their backyards, excitedly trying new cradling tricks and pick-ups. The feeling of knowing that we had helped, inspired and possibly helped create a new generation of Poughkeepsie women’s lacrosse players made the sting of the loss feel so insignificant and the potential of making a difference in the lives of these young girls incredible.