Women's Lacrosse: 2002 Preview
In just its first year of existence, the Elizabethtown College women's
lacrosse program is already shooting for the stars. Head coach Shelly Behrens, in surveying the team, remarked, "Success will come with this group. We have the potential to be really dangerous."
Indeed,
the team bristles with a confidence and an enthusiasm that one may not
regularly expect to find in a first-year varsity program that has not
even had any seasons as a club team under its belt. There are several
reasons why this is the case at Elizabethtown. For one, the talent
level on this team is high and has meshed and grown very well since the
fall. Also, the team's unorthodox approaches to the game in terms of
both strategy and attitude could prove to reap very positive results
during the season, and they already have during practices.
When Behrens
arrived in the fall, she found three very specific groups of players on
the team: upperclass players with lacrosse experience who decided to
try out for the team, the freshmen making up the majority of the team
who were recruited to begin this fledgling program, and beginners among
both freshmen and upperclassmen with a great deal of athletic ability.
"Now," she observed, "it's harder to differentiate between the three.
It's been a very positive transformation into a team."
Behrens
views it as a positive for the team to have a mixture of players with
different backgrounds, and especially to have the upperclass players
who "came out of the woodwork." She continued, "They chose to come out
for this. They've all fit in really wonderfully." One highly talented
upperclass player remarked to Behrens that she views the new-found opportunity to play lacrosse here as a great bonus on top of her education.
"They've
really evolved a lot since the fall," Behrens said. "We have covered a
canyon of stuff and asked a lot of them, and they've kept up." Part of
what has made the team keep up so well is Behrens' stress upon
making training energetic and competitive and teaching her players to
see the value in conditioning. "I look at them as a group and in parts,
and the potential's there, but energy needs to be applied," Behrens said. So far, the energy has taken care of itself. "They don't want to just be good," Behrens noted. "They want to excel." The result is that the Blue Jays embrace conditioning and drills.
The
Blue Jays will use a rather unusual approach to the game. The team will
utilize a very aggressive and attack-oriented style of play, so much so
that even defenders and goaltenders will think about their role in
terms of generating offense. While it has taken a little while to
develop such an aggressive mentality in the team, the players have now
taken to it. One method Behrens has used to create this mentality has been to make practices harder than games will be.
In
addition to Elizabethtown's aggressive approach to play, another
unorthodox element of the Blue Jays' style is their avoidance of
limiting themselves to specific positions and roles. Positions, in the
traditional sense, will only really be used to determine how players
line up on the field during face-offs and to take up space on the
roster list in game programs. Aside from that, versatility is the rule
for Etown. This stands in stark contrast to how most lacrosse players
tend to be immediately pigeonholed into one or two specific positions
shortly after they take up the game.
Also,
Elizabethtown will substitute heavily throughout every game with all
individuals blending into the offensive system, utilizing an approach
similar to what has served the school's men's basketball team well in
recent years. Because of this, everyone on the team will be constantly
involved in the Blue Jays' offensive attack, and this makes it
difficult for opposing defenses to try to halt specific players, as
well as making it difficult to prognosticate who the team's top scorers
will prove to be.
Among this team full of attackers, some of the standouts could emerge in freshmen Jen Manns (Wilmington, DE), Molly Walker (Columbia, MD), Steph Boyle (Folsom, PA), and Sarah Scholl (Forest Hill, MD), as well as junior Sarah Krupka (Tabernacle, NJ),
in addition to many others. However, with the way this team is set up,
one can be assured that no one player or group of players will stand
out very far from the rest.
The 2002 Elizabethtown College Blue Jays can see a bright future immediately before them in just their first season of existence. "It's a special thing to be the first at something," said Behrens. "They take a great deal of pride in that." Over the course of this season, according to Behrens, "We need to find out how good we can be," which could be very good indeed.
