Lacrosse season is starting, and with it, several glaring problems come to light …
Sadly, the sport has taken a lot of casualties in the past two years with government shutdowns in response to the COVID outbreak … and now we are seeing the fallout. I ask, “Was it worth it?”
In talking to a few coaches this year, they say they have a new obstacle: the fact that the number of young athletes having heart issues has increased since the COVID shots … Coaches are now afraid to run their athletes for fear of them dying! This thought sits in the back of every coach’s mind: “Will a boy drop dead on the sports field on my watch?” No matter your political viewpoint, this is just plain fact. And it never was an issue until these shots …
Another challenge is that the CIF is facing a shortage of lacrosse coaches. The reason is simply that CVUSD/CIF limits how much schools can pay coaches. Not a lot of lacrosse coaches want to work for pennies when there’s big money to be made at the club level … Sadly, last year, Thousand Oaks High School dropped both the boys’ and girls’ lacrosse teams, and this year, Westlake High School is dropping their girls’ program … Before COVID, our local high school lacrosse teams were starting to be a force. Now the only two respectable teams are Westlake High School and Agoura High School …
Let me share my experience of what club lacrosse is about. My two sons played club for four years. At the end of the fourth year, I was talking to our lacrosse coach, and he wanted my boys to concentrate on lacrosse club and give up football so they could go back East to play among the top lacrosse recruits … East Coast lacrosse has been popular since the 1800s, and they take the sport seriously. Parents hold their children back to give them an edge against younger players. And since the West Coast teams don’t have NCAA-sanctioned teams, the East is the place to go to get noticed — and to get a college scholarship for lacrosse …
To put a round figure on it, this means signing up for a good club lacrosse team costs about $10,000 per year, with traveling back East to compete and get noticed by college coaches who have NCAA teams … So I asked our coach how much of a scholarship was I chasing? He told me no lacrosse player gets a full scholarship. Colleges split them up, and in most cases, the scholarships cover books … It doesn’t take a genius to see it doesn’t pencil out to pay club teams that kind of money to get a scholarship that pays for books … Club lacrosse strikes me as a money-grabbing scheme. If you’re going in that direction, don’t do it for the scholarship but for the fun of the game …
We just got back from a club tournament in Orange County, “The Air Station Shootout,” with a bunch of high school-age club teams here on the West Coast … I was so disappointed by how this tournament was run. They talk a good game about sportsmanship, but that’s a ruse. My son’s team was badly beating a team the first day in pool play, and with 5 minutes left in the game, the coach from the losing team decided to pull his team from play! He called out, “Go get your goalie. We are done.” The team walked off the field because the coach didn’t like how the calls were going, and they were getting manhandled by the team he was playing. This guy was also swearing at the referees, a clear violation of the code of ethics for the tournament …
His team should have been disqualified for the coach’s poor conduct. It’s not about winning but playing in a sportsmanlike way. That essential teaching tool must be upheld at all costs … Here’s the kicker: by the end of the day in pool play, there were three teams tied with 2 wins and 1 loss apiece. Goal differential would determine who advanced to the winners’ bracket … Lo and behold, the team that walked off the field had a 2-point lead on our team for goal differential and was promoted to the winners’ bracket … I asked the tournament director to please explain how a team which showed poor sportsmanship, quit the game and walked off the field got to play in the winning bracket? The answer was simply that it was because of the goal differential. Nobody seemed to care that the team violated the tournament’s code of ethics … Every game should teach life lessons to athletes, so I contacted the tournament director and asked about this incident … Heard nothing back. Looks again like they’re taking money and not respecting the game.
Next month, better news and local results!
Local professional Frank Enderle played two years of football at Notre Dame High School, one of the top programs with the best coaches, then played for two years at Calabasas High School. He has a lifetime of sports experience, including coaching his own sons in baseball, football, lacrosse and basketball and serving in their booster programs.
