Strathmore lacrosse expecting strong year

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Strathmore Lacrosse Club grew by 16 players this season, bringing the total number of players close to 250 and resulting in one more midget girls team being added to the list.
However, according to president Scott Fargey, the option of two midget girl teams came at a cost to the bantam and peewee levels, where this year’s turnout was not significant enough to form a team.
“We’re getting pretty close to being able to put a team at three levels,” said Fargey. “Hopefully next year if it continues to grow like that it should be good.”
As for the season outlook, the teams haven’t had a lot of practice time to prepare because of evaluations, and few chances to get hyped about the campaign.
However, Fargey remained optimistic that all the teams will be competitive.
The club took advantage for the second consecutive year of having former professional lacrosse players Geoff and Bob Snider of Elev8 Lacrosse out for four hours of coaching clinics prior to the season, which all the coaches had the chance to go through.
Once the season gets underway, both teams’ players will spend time at each other’s practices.
“It’s huge,” said Fargey, “We’re getting a really good response. The coaches are getting really excited about it. Most of the guys that are out have never had a background in lacrosse. A lot of them have coached before maybe in baseball, football or hockey but most of them don’t have experience in lacrosse. This is a great way for everybody to get on the same page of all the coaches teaching the same things from tyke all way up to midget.”
The annual Redneck Rumble Tournament will run again at the beginning of June, and Fargey said the event was sold out before the registration was out, while he’s still getting between three and five interested parties a day wanting to participate.
He added that the kids love the tournament but the only concern he had was that it’s a ‘B’ level event, which he thinks is unfortunate because other levels are watching from afar and wish they could be involved.
“We just don’t have the floor time,” said Fargey. “If we had more floor time, we’d run a ‘B’ and ‘C’ (level) and all the teams in our association would be there, but unfortunately there’s such a lack of floor time in town, there’s just no space to expand the tournament.”
As for the junior team, he would like see them have more of a presence in the community, while having more promotions to get more fans out to games.