by Dakota Antelman
The girls lacrosse team has been severely affected by snow this spring. With their field buried under as much as a foot of snow late into the month of March, they have been confined to the gym for two more weeks than is customary.
Though they have been practicing every day, splitting hours with girls tennis, the practices have been heavy on conditioning and have not lent themselves well to stickwork or team scrimmages of any sort. The team does an hour of straight conditioning to start practices and then moves to the larger portion of the gym to work with their head coach, Mark Polomarenko, on what lacrosse skills they can.
“Inside we haven’t been able to do as much as we can,” said first time varsity defender Zoe Moskowitz. “[Specifically] the lacrosse balls inside are really, really bouncy, so when we’re trying to pick up the balls from the ground, [it’s] not really the same kind of feel as we would outside.”
The discrepancy between indoor and outdoor practice was clear when the team first graced a field this spring, in a March 25 scrimmage vs Nashoba Regional High School.
According to Mostkowitz, the low scoring game served to call out the parts of the team’s game that they need to work on in the coming days and weeks.
“We need defense; we need defense so bad,” she said. “We need to work on how we set up our defense. No one has had formal training on defense, so we all sort of have been working on trying to figure out that.”
With little formal training in defensive lacrosse, it has been a struggle for players to adapt their playing styles to effectively negate, rather than maintain, possession of the ball, as the forwards would prefer, as well as stay within the rules of the game of lacrosse.
Defense was a struggle last season as well, when, in winning just two games out of 13, the Hawks allowed the second most goals per game (12.3) in the Midland League B. The team as a whole hopes to not repeat the mistakes they made last year. With that in mind, there is a silver lining to the abnormal start to the season.
“Since we’re in a confined space, I feel like it has let us, especially the younger girls, build a relationship with some of the older girls that we wouldn’t have been able to build outside,” JV freshmen forward Caroline Clouter said. “I feel like that’s gonna benefit us because as a team you’re supposed to be able to know each other. I think the gym in a chemistry sense has prepared us to go outside and have a good season.”
Senior Moskowitz credits the team’s captains, Alexa Duplisea and Taylor Polomarenko, with building much of that chemistry and team respect.
“They’re both really good at supporting each other and supporting the team. They’re also really good at inspiring some of the younger kids to work as hard as they can.”
Though it has been hard and relatively unexpected, Moskowitz and many others, who have been a part of the girls team for multiple years, recognize the positive things that the abnormal start to the season has brought out in this team. They hope this abbreviated early spring will translate to wins by the time mid-April and May games arrive.
“This year we have a lot of determined people, everybody is really determined to win, everybody is determined to do the best that they can. That’s something that maybe in years past we’ve been lacking. But I definitely hope that this year we can do a lot better and work better as a team,” Moskowitz insists.
interview with Coach Polomarenko by Siobhan Richards
