I have written about lacrosse many times so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that lacrosse is my favourite sport. I started playing lacrosse when I was 12 years old, I was still living in Edmonton and my hockey coach asked me to play on his box lacrosse team in the summer, so I said sure. It was a pretty smooth transition from hockey to box lacrosse; both sports require the use of a stick as an implement, both sports have 6 players on the floor/ice at the same time, both sports require excellent hand eye coordination, both sports require rotations to shoot/pass, both sports have a physical element, both sports have you shooting on a goalie to score, and finally both sports are fast and fun!
As I said both sports require strong hand eye coordination, and the ability to rotate so when I got my first lacrosse stick from Canadian Tire, a Brine Shotgun, I spent countless hours throwing the ball against the garage. Even though I had played hockey my whole life and was used to having a stick in my hands things didn’t start very well. I spent a majority of my time chasing the ball and learning to pick it up, as it turns out this was and is still one of the strongest aspects of my game. After a couple of weeks spending hours banging the ball against the wall I figured out how to throw properly which brought the next challenge, learning how to catch! This wasn’t too bad because I learned how the ball would bounce during my countless hours chasing the ball around my yard, but by this time I was starting to practice with my team and we didn’t spend much time standing still catching balls, we had to catch them on the run (the way the game is meant to be played). My first season of box lacrosse was fun and challenging and by the time the season was over I had a pretty good grasp on all the basic skills needed to play the game.
I only played one season of lacrosse in Alberta and luckily moved to one of the hot beds of lacrosse in the world, British Columbia, and from there my love for the game grew. I quit playing soccer right away, and 4 years later I quit playing hockey to play box lacrosse and field lacrosse. Moving to BC give me the opportunity to play in a more competitive league and gave me access to fantastic coaches that really helped develop my skills and knowledge of both box lacrosse and field lacrosse (I will write a separate post regarding field lacrosse which is a totally separate game). When I was 17 I was the captain of the Surrey Stickmen Intermediate A team that was coached by Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame members the Tasker brothers and we won a provincial championship! It was one of the greatest moments of my lacrosse career and I was fortunate to be a member of such a fantastic team, and I still play with many of those teammates today. The bond you create with your teammates when you come together to win a championship is something that can’t be broken over time and is probably the reason why I love this sport so much… well that and the mental and physical challenges that come from trying to beat your opponents!
Josh Neumann, BHK, PTS, TSCC-1
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