June 9, 2010
John Stark program making strides
by Roger Brown/
During the 2008 season, the John Stark Regional High School boys lacrosse team was a rudderless ship. At least that’s how Parker Gage saw it.
John Stark, located in Weare, N.H., had never been a winning program, and the Generals weren’t winning many games that spring either. In fact, they were everyone’s patsy. They finished the season with a 1-13-0 record in Division III, the league that includes the New Hampshire schools with the smallest enrollment.
Making matters worse, Gage said, was the fact that the John Stark players weren’t much better when the season ended than when it began.
“The coaches … they were good people,” Gage explained. “But their lacrosse IQ wasn’t that high. We were doing mostly conditioning when we needed to work on our stick skills.
“It was more of a club-team vibe than varsity. If you didn’t show up for practice, there wasn’t really any consequence. The kids cared more about whether or not we were going to stop at McDonald’s on the way home than they did about the game. That wasn’t what I signed up for.”
Gage is now a senior and one of four captains on the 2010 John Stark team. The Generals still aren’t title contenders — and probably won’t be for a while — but the program has some direction thanks, in part, to a pair of former New England College lacrosse players: Stephen Cobb and Kyle Burke.
Cobb, 23, was doing a teaching internship at John Stark when he learned that the program’s entire coaching staff wouldn’t be back for the 2009 season.
“I knew I wanted to get into coaching and it looked like a fun challenge — trying to take a program and flip it like that,” Cobb said. “The program had just been terrible for years. Kyle and I had heard the horror stories but we said, ‘Let’s go for this.’
“Our game plan was to go in humble — not to go in and act like we were tenured coaches. We had to convince the kids, ‘OK, we’re in this together.’ We had to earn the kids’ respect and they had to do likewise.”
So, even though they had no previous coaching experience, Cobb and Burke became co-head coaches for the John Stark varsity program. They also brought in Daniel Foster as an assistant coach and to work with the JVs.
The tangible results haven’t been dramatically different — John Stark won three games last season — but there seems to be little doubt that the Generals are now following a plotted course. Moreover, the coaches and players believe that, in time, the wins will come.
“They (the coaches) definitely have a plan in place,” Gage said. “They definitely see the big picture. Before it was take it day by day.”
Cobb said he’s seen plenty of improvement, but that the gains haven’t always shown up on the scoreboard. The Generals have been competitive against Division III opponents this season, but victories are still elusive. At press time, John Stark had a 1-7 record, although there were more close games than blowout losses, a distinct change from the past.
“Our goals-for and goals-against averages have improved, but we’re still working on building confidence,” Cobb said. “We still need the kids to play to win, and not play not to lose. The skill level is still developing, but the culture is changing.”
Gage said the team’s won-loss record doesn’t tell the whole story. He insists John Stark no longer resembles the John Stark teams from 2006, 2007 and 2008, a time when the Generals went a combined 3-35.
Ultimately, Gage believes he’s looking at the beginning of a great story, one that will play out in the years ahead, when he looks back at his high school and sees success on the field, and knows it started with coaches who took a chance on a laughingstock program. He wishes that other players in similar circumstances could experience the same kind of transition.
“It was a rather quick turnaround,” Gage said. “They wanted us to become students of the game and watch lacrosse whenever we could. It’s definitely been a step in the right direction.
“I think as a team we’d really like to thank these guys for what they’ve done.”
