February 4, 2010
An alarming attitude
by Chuck Jaffe/
I was at a youth lacrosse skills-development event recently, featuring some terrific coaches at a gorgeous indoor sports facility. There was one station for agility and conditioning drills, another for shooting, a third for goaltenders, an area for supervised scrimmaging and more.
Yet throughout the three-hour event, most of the coaches in those areas stood around doing nothing, because the vast majority of players — and parents — were on the smallest field, trying to light up the radar gun there with the big shots.
There were wild shots and dangerous shots, foolish shots, falling-down shots, shots that would have hit the goalie in the chest, an alarming number of drops and whiffs and very few blasts that pinged the crossbar or tucked inside the corners.
What every one of those shots had in common was obvious: None of the players there could ever score with them in a game.
That's fine when it's Paul Rabil of the Boston Cannons showing off an elongated wind-up and flailing follow-through in wowing the crowds at a Major League Lacrosse All-Star Game, but Rabil will be the first one to tell you that what he shoots in an exhibition and what he does during a game are two completely different things. What's more, Rabil is at the very top of his game; there's no denying the hours he spends honing his skills and doing the basics, working the wall and focusing on all of the little things that make his game outstanding. He works on his shot to make his game better, not to get a better score on a radar gun.
By comparison, the best players at this youth event had limited stick skills. They thought they were good and cool but, at best, they were average for their age groups. Usually at a youth event, you can identify the standouts, the ones who have both the body type and game to be a star in the future; here, the only way any of these kids was going to see stars around them was if they got punched in the head.
And yet the players — egged on by their parents — wasted the chance to do skill work to stand in line so that they could take a big shot with a double wind-up, an exaggerated hitch, a dangerous follow-through and no relation to what real lacrosse is all about.
I'd like to believe it was no big deal, just kids fooling around, but the truth is that the attitude behind it is common and alarming. It's not the first time I have seen this waste of time and energy backed by the assumption of "I'm so good, I can afford to miss chances to work on the small stuff." While there is the very rare player whose athletic talents are natural and endowed by a higher power, the vast majority of top players spend hours learning every little aspect of the game, and work on the small stuff every chance they get.
Old-timers talk about the rigors of breaking in a stick in the early plastic days, or the troubles they had working with woodies before the advent of the plastic head. Basic simple tasks with those sticks were a challenge, which is why players spent hours honing their skills, mastering those sticks until they could throw with accuracy and precision, and catch anything tossed their way.
Today, stick design and pocket advances make it so that a boy or girl with little or no experience can pick up a stick and throw and catch in minutes. It's a huge step forward for the game, but a giant leap backwards in skill development. You don't need to throw properly for the ball to get where you want it to go most of the time. Young athletes can feel like they know everything they need to throw and catch properly in a matter of minutes, at which point a simple game of catch gets boring pretty quickly.
But throwing for the radar gun, that's fun every time; it's like turning lacrosse into a video game. Every extra tick on the gun feels like victory, when in fact itís promoting or reinforcing bad habits. Likewise, I have seen plenty of young players who know every stick trick, but who canít consistently hit the target with their passes or shots, or who canít scoop a ball in traffic. Their moves are cool, but useless; their twirling looks great when theyíre sitting on a couch, but it looks stupid when theyíre being stripped of the ball on the field.
Players don't learn until a higher level — typically in high school, but sometimes in college — that all of the athleticism in the world can't make up for lousy stick skills against good competition. Tomorrow's on-the-field frustrations are created by today's unwillingness to put the time in to do the little things right.
With the advent of new pocket-sized radar guns — the size of an iPod, they'll be on the market retailing for about $200 beginning in March — and "trick sticks" that are good for exhibition but illegal in games, and the general hype for doing anything "cool," this isn't going away.
Anyone hoping to be an outstanding lacrosse player needs to recognize that what truly counts is what you do on the field, not on the speed gun. By focusing on the instant gratification that comes from forgoing the "little things" in favor of meaningless-but-cool garbage, there will be a lot of athletes in the next generation who are impressive lacrosse players only at times when it doesn't matter.
