New lacrosse team looks for chemistry to win

For the first time in school history, students see male athletes wearing shoulder pads and helmets for something other than football. The school lacrosse team is the “new kid on the block” for school sports, and it is ready to make a scene.

The team needs to overcome new challenges. For the lacrosse team this year, one of its major challenges will be facing the large amount of inexperienced players.

“I’ve been playing club for four or five years, and most other schools have players who have been playing for that same amount of time,” senior Dillon Christine said. “We have a lot of new players who haven’t played for [very long], but this is a good start for a team. I can definitely see it being good in four or five years.”

However, the biggest issue for the lacrosse team will be working together as a team that is comprised of players from different lacrosse backgrounds. The fact that these players have never played together is also a concern.

“Our biggest challenge is team chemistry,” senior Ken Anderson said. “Every team needs to develop, and once we get used to our different styles of play, we will mesh and be ready to really compete.”

Although the team is young and inexperienced, it played Mountain View High and Saint Francis High Schools over winter break in friendly scrimmages to work out the kinks in its game. The team opted not to keep score for those scrimmages, but instead used them as practice games to prepare for its tournament in Watsonville on Saturday, February 27. Although the team eventually lost all 4 of the 25-minute games in the tournament, it agrees the tournament was a valuable preseason experience.

“On Saturday there were a lot of highlights, but we have a lot to build on,” Varsity Head Coach Greg Mengis said. “We need to work on offense and defense, and we need to focus on fundamentals. We need to get better at catching, throwing and scooping up ground balls.”

In Watsonville, the young LAHS squad was forced to work together for an entire tournament, which players concur has brought their team to another level.

“I feel like the team really started to gel [at the tournament],” sophomore Chuck Kuo said. “Before we were just a bunch of random guys, but now we’re a team that’s communicating better, and we’re starting to run our offense well.”

One of the reasons the lacrosse team seems to be improving already is its ability to adapt to the new sport through game time experience.

“We learn fast; that’s one of our strengths because we have so many young players,” senior Josiah Loh said. “We now need to [focus on] learning strategy and tactics because most of us are first-year players.”

As far as competition goes, the team realizes there are more experienced and seasoned teams in the league that are going to be more accustomed to playing with one another.

“Our biggest competition will be Palo Alto,” Ken said. “The club Palo Alto Tomahawks mainly has Palo Alto students [who played together] before the high school teams were ever made.”

The team will also play Mountain View in a later scrimmage and hopes to have improved enough by then to challenge its rival team. When the teams played over break, LAHS was unable to generate any offense against Mountain View’s year-old team.

However, since LAHS plays in the lower El Camino Division while MVHS is in the upper De Anza Division, both of the times these teams play each other will be for scrimmaging purposes only. LAHS will play Woodside, Leland, Palo Alto and Gunn High Schools in league games.

Lacrosse will be an interesting sport for LAHS students to watch because it is new this year. Josiah stated other reasons for why the game is intriguing for the players and why it is important that the school finally has a lacrosse team.

“It’s a combo of football, basketball and hockey all into one sport,” Josiah said. “It’s a fun sport that’s not that common on the West Coast, but it’s starting to be. It’s nice we can build at it now.”

Lacrosse plays two league home games this year. Gunn plays at LAHS Thursday, April 7. Woodside Priory plays at LAHS Thursday, April 22.