Lacrosse is making a name for itself in the Bay Area, especially at Woodside High School. Primarily thought of as a preppy rich kid sport, lacrosse is becoming mainstream as it continues to gain popularity in public high schools. Personally, I have just started my fourth year playing for my high school’s team.
This sport is ever growing and it doesn’t look like there is a limit in the near future.
“I started playing eighth-grade year,” recalled Kayla Louis, a senior at Woodside High School who received many lacrosse scholarships and college recruitment offers. “My older sister played and so then I joined her and played lacrosse also. We practice every day of the week except the weekends and they are usually two-hour practices. But I also joined a club team, which is on the weekends, and so that’s like another two-hour practice. Plus if we go to tournaments, it’s like the whole weekend.”
Louis now spends her free time on the sport, constantly playing even outside of the school season. “I would definitely say it has grown a lot as a sport,” she described. “Bringing context from my club team, we started off with like two teams like a year ago, and now our club has grown so much, and we have almost nine teams.”
The lacrosse community is ever-expanding, and the easiest example is Woodside’s team itself. The program started small but is finally getting larger as interest in the sport increases.
“We definitely had a huge turn out this year,” noted Louis. “We had like 30 freshmen come out brand-new to the sport. A lot of them are interested in doing it, and a lot of them are improving pretty fast.”
This transformation only recently began, but it is very quickly changing the sport and teams around the Bay Area.
“I started playing lacrosse because I played baseball and soccer all my life, and eventually I started to get bored of them, so I wanted to pick up a new sport that I never played before,” Woodside High School sophomore Ben Thall stated. Thall began playing for Firehawk’s lacrosse in seventh grade.
Thall sees a similar pattern in the increase of participation and enthusiasm for boys lacrosse.
He says, “I’ve only been here for two years but the change from last year to this year is really good and really beneficial, and I think this year we have a better chance of winning more.”
With the growing interest, lacrosse as a sport has been getting harder and more competitive. Kevin Miller is one of Woodside’s two girls lacrosse coaches; along with Stacy Myers, he is responsible for starting the program and overseeing its remarkable growth over the past seven years.
“It’s going to be every game,” reflected Miller. “Even though we came out hard, every team is going to come back. It is going to be competitive. Every game is going to be competitive. Our league is very, very good this year.”
With its changing demographics, new audiences are eating the sport up, as it is now catering to the East Coast and the West, boys and girls, rich and the poor. So, grab a stick and join in on the fun.
