A New Lacrosse Player

As of yesterday, we’ve officially added another sport to the family list. Tomas started things off with cross country, nordic, and track. Daniela followed in his footsteps until now, when she left track behind to jump over to the lacrosse team.

Being on a team sport for the first time brings some different territory. For one thing, there’s much more in the way of unfamiliar gear. Daniela spent a while Sunday getting her mouth guard squared away, and she wasn’t exactly a huge fan of it once it was ready. (She came upstairs with it in and said, smiling, “I don’t know about this sport, guys.” Mouth guards do, indeed, look pretty goofy if you’re just wearing them around the house. I reminded her everyone else would be looking goofy right there with her, so it wouldn’t feel goofy at all. She countered by reminding me she’d have to have eye gear on as well.

Hey. I’m not the one who chose to play lacrosse.

So why did she do it? A few reasons. First off, she just wanted to try something new. What she really wanted was a volleyball team, but we don’t have a volleyball team at our high school, so that was a no go. She thought about joining the tennis team for a while, but she has a number of friends on the lacrosse team, and that won her over in the end.

Practice-wise, it doesn’t seem that different from other sports. Lots of after school practices. The big difference is the number of games/events she’ll have: 11 from the middle of April through the end of May, and then I assume there might be playoffs. I know absolutely nothing about the sport except the fact that they throw balls with sticks that have nets at the end. I guess I’ll figure it out, the same way as I figured out cross country and nordic.

This is the first sport we’ve done that really requires hand-eye coordination, which should be a fun thing for Daniela to tackle. It’ll also be the first contact sport, so Daniela’s height and all that time in the gym will pay off in ways you don’t necessarily see in sports like cross country.

Anyway, she’s excited, so I’m excited for her. We’ll see how this goes. Wish her luck!