I saw three of our local teams vie for lacrosse championships at Castleton State College on Saturday - GMVS boys faced Rice and the Chelsea girls took on Oxbow. Two of our smallest schools were on the biggest stage their sport offers in this state for high school competition, and both had fantastic showings.
The Green Mountain Valley School is a ski academy that offers just soccer and lacrosse - its students are devoted to skiing in the winter, and all year long for that matter. Saturday was the Gumbies' first-ever final appearance, and the week prior, they won notched their first-ever semifinal win. The 2011 playoffs were just the third the team has competed in. Ever.
Chelsea has fewer than 40 girls in the whole school, yet the Red Devils have been a girls lacrosse dynasty for years - Saturday was their ninth appearance in the final in 10 years. They only missed in 2004 thanks to Montpelier. And they have five 8th graders on the team - five! And they play and play well. If to opponents feel like they see the same dominant girls forever, they do - they see them for five years, not four.
Oxbow has only been a varsity program for four or five years, and when the Olympians first started playing, they had back-to-back winless seasons. Musty also coaches soccer and basketball at the Bradford school, and a lot of the same girls play the same three sports. No wonder they've got great team chemistry. The Olympians are in the process of adding boys lacrosse, which I am looking forward to. Stowe is adding both boys and girls lacrosse in the near future as well.
Here are some of my quotes from Sam Jackson of GMVS, John Parker of Chelsea and Brian Musty of Oxbow that couldn't make it into my story but still are important in showing the accomplishments of these small programs.
Jackson: "We’ve only done this twice, and the first year we lost in the quarterfinals. It’s an interesting thing because, as a ski academy, our guys have a clear focus that isn’t lacrosse-related that takes a lot of time and energy for them. It’s what they’ve devoted themselves to and they’ve all been willing to put in additional time to be a part of this team and work hard at it when they could continue to focus on skiing or doing some dry-land stuff or taking a break after a long winter.
But these guys come out and really enjoy the team aspect of it and the older kids have done a great job of modeling during the winter the importance of getting your stick out and throw the ball around a little bit. We get a late start, we cram a lot of games into a short period of time, we don’t have a lot of time to practice and we don’t have a lot of guys, so it’s tricky for us. I think the kids are the ones who have decided it’s something they’re going to take seriously. They want to continue to excel and compete at. That’s where it’s coming from."
Parker: "It’s real exciting. We have a small school with only 35 girls and you can win a state championship at the Division-II level.
We have a super core group of girls with very good skills and who are very competitive. Games like this, it shows up. But I also want to give Oxbow a lot of credit.
We won it as a team, which was super."
Musty: "John does a great job with them, they have a great, strong program and a great goalie this year. We did pretty good shooting-wise on her. I’m really proud of my kids.
I don’t know if it’s reasonable or not but it will be the goal. That’s our goal every year, every sport I coach. We often talk at the beginning of the season for our goal to be one of the last two teams standing at the end of the season, and if we can do that, we’ve got a shot."
Congratulations, coaches and teams!
-Anna Grearson
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