From the podcast: Oaks LC and box lacrosse coach Joe O’Neill

Coach Joe O'Neill of Oaks LC and the Paper City Oaks joined the "Chasing The Goal" podcast this week.

On this week’s episode of New England Lacrosse Journal’s “Chasing The Goal” podcast, hosts Kyle Devitte and Jack Piatelli talk with Oaks Lacrosse Club coach Joe O’Neill.

O’Neill is best known for coaching Wahconah Regional (Mass.) to its first-ever MIAA Division 4 title in 2022. However, he has a long background in the sport and has been involved with box lacrosse in western Massachusetts and beyond for over a decade.

He has coached box teams of all ages across the border in New York as well as in Canada, developing young talents like his son, Billy O’Neill, who is now a sophomore midfielder at Nazareth.

In the winter of 2022, O’Neill put together a Senior B-level box lacrosse team based out of Holyoke, Mass. That team, the Paper City Oaks, won their conference in the NABLL, a national box lacrosse organization developing talent within the United States.

The Oaks went on to Nationals in their first season, beating both the Stallions and the Nor’Easters — two well-established teams in the division — along the way. Though the team didn’t advance past the first round of the national tournament, the inaugural season put them on the map in the Northeast corridor.

Watch the full podcast below on YouTube. It’s also available on all major podcast platforms. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and a review. Watch more episodes on the Chasing the Goal podcast channel.

Here are some excerpts from the pod.

Jack Piatelli: In box (lacrosse), making adjustments on the fly, calling timeouts, things of that nature … as a coach, you have to really pay attention to what’s going on in front of you. You also have to pay attention to what’s going on in the box and make sure you have the right personnel on there because you’ve got changes going on all the time. There’s a lot going on, not only on the field but on the bench, right?

Joe O’Neill: I think one of the things that helped me is trusting my assistants. I’m on a box bench, I’m watching the overall game and my assistant coach is running the (substitution) doors. You have to trust them and you have to be able to communicate quickly with them. I feel that transfers very well to the field game. Also, it was kind of a joke amongst the writers and people who would see my field bench — I had a ton of coaches on my sideline and I had two people running my box. I had a person sending guys off on one side and then I had another guy that was getting them ready. So there was a lot of communication that was happening with that. 

Kyle Devitte: Tell me a little bit more about how you founded the Oaks. Because I know Billy played for Nor’easters as well. There’s a New England-based box league that’s really expanded. And Jack has a team. He’s wearing his shirt now, the Northmen are in that as well. And it’s it’s kind of become a feeding ground. I mean, one of your guys was drafted in the NLL after the season. Can you talk a little bit more about the genesis?

Joe O’Neill: After Billy graduated high school, he had some offers to go up north, but he wanted to stay close to home because he was going away to school. So I contacted Ryan Conwell and said, “Hey, if you’re interested, I got him. We’ll get him out there for practices and stuff like that.” So he played a summer with Cambridge.

The next year came around and he again had some interest from some teams up north, but he said, “I want to be home. I want to see my friends out here. I want to just be home.” We’ve always talked about having a team out here of some sort. I go, “This is the opportunity where we could we could do (a team) here.” And he said, “Yeah. Let’s do this here.”

So (it was) him wanting to stay home and wanting to take a little bit harder route. The hardest thing is to get a team going — and we took the hard route. My partner, Charlie Edwards, and I have wanted to have a box lacrosse team out here for years, and this was kind of finally the straw that broke the camel’s back on getting it off the ground. And it was it was an amazing summer. Get great fans in Holyoke. It’s kind of what we thought it was going to be because there’s not much else going on. So we had good fans. We had a deejay playing music the whole time. It was a real environment when you came to our barn.

@TheKyleDevitte
[email protected]

More Episodes