The season hasn’t started yet, but the Lady Spartans Lacrosse team is already at work. They face a long road of preseason scrimmages against some of the best teams in the city, but before that, they had a tournament to attend in Gatlinburg where they would play against teams they had never faced before. Prior to the team stepping out onto the field, concerning problems arose.
The team was faced with a difficulty: a shortage of players. The tournament was on a Saturday, which meant that players would have to miss school to travel to Gatlinburg on Friday, and without a team bus, many players without rides had no choice but to stay at school.
“We were missing quite a few people,” Karolina DeLeon (10) said. “We only had one sub for the games because … a lot of people didn’t come.”
The lack of substitute players meant trouble for the lacrosse team. Lacrosse games can be long and take copious amounts of running and passing the ball between players to drive it into the net, so players knew they would have to persevere and fight exhaustion during games. However, the problem became worse when the team first saw the tournament schedule.
“The first day we played two games back to back and the second day we also played two games back to back, so we didn’t have a break … and they [the games] are … 55 minutes,” DeLeon said. “It involves the same amount of running as soccer because you run up and down the field trying to get your ball to the other side to score and … it’s like constant running.”
In addition to the lack of substitutes, the team also lacked experience in comparison to others. The team is mostly first-year players, and they were facing teams who had been playing lacrosse since childhood. The situation made it vital for the team captain, Allison Totty (11), to work with and correct the new players.
“I think with being one of … the very few public schools in Memphis who play lacrosse, it’s very hard to get up to the level of the private school girls, and especially being one of the only ones who starts lacrosse in high school, like, it’s very hard to have a freshman whose only been playing for a few months step out on the field with freshmen who’ve been playing since third grade,” Totty said.
Despite the challenges the team faced, they went into the first game ready to compete. Although the match resulted in a loss by two points for the Spartans, the team captain and coaches immediately recognized and corrected issues.
“I think it was a lot of just miscommunication because it takes a lot of communicating for the defense to fully work together,” Totty said. “Without the communication between all seven girls back there and our goalie, it’s pretty difficult, and it’s also on the attack side, just not connecting on feeds, giving up the ball, making turnovers and not giving them back in time.”
The loss was a disappointment to the players, but the team had another game to play right away.. Exhausted from the first game, the team turned around from their previous loss and pulled off a victory, blowing out the opposing team.
“We played our first game and to be honest I think we played fairly poorly for ourselves, but then after that we made a bunch of corrections that our coaches told us to do and then [in] our second game we did a lot better and we actually beat them 10-0,” Abby Griffith (10) said.
With the last game, the first part of the tournament was over, but the day was not. Later that night, the team decided to do a fun activity.
“On the first day …. we went to a haunted house which I think greatly improved team bonding, like I know a lot of people on my team better now … after that than I did before going into it,” Griffith said. “I just think everybody was just talking, we were waiting in line for such a long time which had us all just talking to each other and I just think that was the best part of my whole trip.”
As the team continued to bond and become more comfortable with each other, the second day approached. The Spartans were set to play a more competitive team, and winning this game meant they would make it to the finals. However, the game ended in a 6-8 loss.
“We just didn’t play well,” Griffith said. “We weren’t placing our shots. We shot into the goalie so many times. I saw at one point our coach got so mad he threatened to leave because he kept telling people to place their shots and they were just shooting to the goalie.”
Despite the growth the team experienced the first few days, the players reflected on what else they had to learn and continued to focus on how they could improve rather than concentrate on the negative.
“It was hard … we’ve never been super good so it wasn’t too much of a let-down,” Totty said. “I mean it would’ve been super nice to come home with a trophy or like something to show for how far we’ve grown and how far that group of girls in particular has learned.”
After the loss, the Spartans had one more game to play. The motivated team was able to pull off a victory and snatch a third place spot.
“I think that it went a lot better than we thought. Like we went into it thinking ‘man, these people are going to crush us, so coming out with third is honestly a lot better than I thought and coming out with those girls is just a lot better than I thought it would be,” Totty said.
