Coaching

The girls' season started last week when we began indoor practices. It's always a bit crazy (and headache inducing) having all the girls in a small gym. We always start out with the new girls coming first and learning the basics—cradling, throwing and catching, and ground balls. The returning players arrived after the first hour and it's always a challenge to find drills that don't involve too much opportunity for balls to go flying and hitting other girls (which certainly happens!). It's essentially a way to give our players an opportunity to pick up a stick again and get their heads back into the sport—it's it's never easy to coach inside!

I played soccer, tennis, and lacrosse competitively. In England we played lacrosse in the fall and tennis in the spring. Moving back to the U.S. in 10^th grade, I found that both sports are spring games; one can’t play both lacrosse and tennis. So I picked up soccer as my fall sport and ultimately chose to play tennis in high school (I considered myself a better tennis player than lacrosse). When I got to college I decided to switch back to lacrosse, thinking I’d be able to play tennis for the rest of my life, but this was my last chance to play lax. (At times I’ve regretted that decision—or at least the rationale for the decision as I have certainly not played as much tennis over the years as I would have liked!)

Fast forward 15 years to when our son entered Kindergarten and, like all the other kids in town, began playing soccer, I thought I’d coach as I’d played the game. I quickly learned that having played the game was certainly not a prerequisite to coaching, but being a guy was pretty important. There was exactly one other mom coaching that first year. The next year there were 3 of us. Our son quickly determined he did not like the game, but our daughter definitely took to it—so I kept on coaching. But even in 5^th grade, when the youth league split into boys’ and girls’ teams, the coaches were almost all male. It was frustrating, at times, to want to be a role model for the girls as a coach, but to find such a boys club of dads. I felt that it was and is really important for girls to have female role models—women who they know, not just the Mia Hamm or Christine Lilly superstars—helping them understand that they can be just as strong and determined and athletic as the boys.

All that is to say that when I was invited by another woman to coach the girls youth lacrosse, I was thrilled. The girls and boys version of the sport really are quite different and, while the game is becoming more like the boys, learning the basics is critical. Just as Picasso had to learn to paint in a classic, formal way before he could strip it down to the bare elements of Cubism, I believe it’s important that girls to learn correct cradling and the basics of picking up ground balls before they start slipping their top hand way down the stick or cradling and picking up the ball one-handed. After all, there are plenty of times when those basic skills are needed. If you can’t master those basics you don’t have anything to fall back on when the play gets tough.

More on coaching next time…