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Lacrosse teams enjoy co-op with different schools
The Blackhawks lacrosse team before a game.
April 17, 2019
The SPA lacrosse teams began practice last week, beginning a season that differs slightly from other sports played at SPA. Both the girls and boys teams are combined with another school, meaning that they practice on different campuses and with students who do not attend SPA.
Duncan Fleming plays for Blackhawks lacrosse, a team made up of both SPA and St. Thomas Academy students. Fleming believes that there are both positives and negatives that come with the co-op team experience.
“It is fun and interesting to play on a team with people you wouldn’t otherwise know, and it is a great experience to get to know them,” Fleming said, “ [but] there is some difficulty with team bonding as a whole caused by having players from so many different schools.”
The girls’ lacrosse team faces the same challenges but has found ways to turn these challenges into positives. United is a team of both SPA and Visitation players, and captain Betsy Romans enjoys the differences that playing on a co-op team brings.
“One [difference] is that there are players every year who I’ve never met or sometimes even seen before, which is actually super cool because I’m always meeting new people,” Romans said.
Aside from the new faces that Romans encounters, she makes lasting friendships with people outside her group.
“While it’s sad that I don’t get to see most of the girls every day at school, it makes the season that much more exciting and we end up spending so much time together outside of school that it doesn’t take away from how close our team is,” Romans said.
Yet combined teams also come with challenges. Romans and Fleming both admit that it can be difficult to encourage more numbers of SPA players to join the teams.
“Getting more SPA girls to join has been pretty hard, especially now being a senior and being more disconnected from the younger grades who are more likely to pick up a new sport,” Romans said.
Fleming seems to agree.
“We definitely want more players representing SPA as part of the program,” he said.
However, this challenge hasn’t stopped the effort to recruit new players.
“Every year, specifically around or just before the start of the season we try to reach out to any students, specifically in younger grades that show interest in joining,” Fleming said, “We invite them to captain run practices to give them the opportunity to try lacrosse, regardless of if they have played before or not.”
Romans takes a similar approach.
“I often tell girls who are maybe unsure about playing or looking for a new sport that lacrosse is low risk high reward in that no one cares how good you are and whether you are on JV or varsity, we really are just one team.”
