Do you love what you do? Do you work hard on the things you love? There are a lot of challenging things in lacrosse. It is not as easy as it looks; you have to be very aggressive and physical. When you’re going to scoop the ball off the ground you have to dive for it. You have to race to the ball, have your top hand up on the stick and scoop it as hard as you can while bending your knees. Once you have it in your stick you need to cradle the ball, and then you sprint to the goal and hammer it.

          If you want to be good at lacrosse the one thing you really need to be good at is cradling and catching; you need to have those skills down. How you cradle a ball is you need to take your stick and move it back and forth and move it to the right and then to the left and cradle it in. One way to think about it is pretend the ball is an egg and it is very fragile and you do not want to drop it. And when you're catching the ball, think about it the same way. When catching the ball, put your stick out in the front and bring your stick back into a horizontal position when the ball lands in your stick. There are a lot of different techniques to catch and cradle the ball, but those are a couple of ways I like to do it.

          The next thing to be good at lacrosse is shooting. Shooting looks really easy, not difficult at all, but it is not easy by any means. If you want to be good at shooting the one skill you have to be good at is pulling your bottom hand down and pushing with your top hand. Pulling with your bottom hand gives you way more power than pulling down with your top hand. When going to the goal you want to have so much power, and when you shoot you want to shoot at the goalie’s feet because 99% of the time when you shoot at the goalie’s feet it will go in. When you shoot at their body you will have a 50% chance of the ball going into the goal. And that is some of the best techniques for shooting.

          The next thing to be good at lacrosse is passing. Passing looks like this really easy thing to do like shooting, but it is totally not. There are a million different ways to pass. You can pass through the legs, behind your back, and of course, a regular pass. When you are passing you want to put your stick out in front of you like you're asking for the ball. And when you're passing the ball you want to pull with your bottom hand and push with your top hand; it is really important for you to do that. When you pass the ball you want to make sure the ball is in the sweet spot of the stick. The sweet spot is the top of the stick where the ball sinks into the stick. When you pass the ball you want to pass it at a medium speed so it gets to the person quickly but also not throwing it so hard where they can’t catch it. Passing the ball is pretty important when it comes to lacrosse. You want to make sure you have solid, good passes.

          Lacrosse is a really fun sport to play. It may seem super challenging at first, but you will get the hang of it. But remember, you never have to be an athlete to play lacrosse, but if you work as hard as you can, who knows where life will bring you. Like my coach always says, “I brought a team together and I coached them really hard, and by the time they got into high school they won the state championship.”  Never give up what you love.

-Gianna H.