Manatee High’s Lacrosse Club Scores First Victory

It isn’t an official school sport yet, but Manatee High School’s lacrosse club took a step toward advancing the cause with a 3-2 victory over a club from Clearwater on Thursday night.

It was the club’s first win, and the enthusiastic team and cheering fans in the bleachers celebrated the triumph in overtime under the lights at a Manatee High School field.

Trey Stern, who scored the winning goal, was tired but elated by the win.

“It just bounced over to me,” he said of the ball. “I hit it with the back of the stick in, like baseball.

“I feel good.”

Lacrosse is more familiar up north, several parents said as they watched with pride as their sons raced up and down the field, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to use terms from other sports – like soccer and hockey – to describe the action on the field. Even Manatee coach Ron Stephens reverted to basketball terminology to describe a rush by the Clearwater team toward the Manatee goal early in the game.

“Fast break, fast break!” he shouted at the Manatee defenders.

“We’re a club, separate from the school, so we’re associated with the school,” he said.

The goal is to show the school what they’re doing, and maybe someday the county system will make lacrosse an official school sport. There is a lacrosse program at St. Stephen’s and at Cardinal Mooney High School in Sarasota, Stephens said, and there’s also a program at Lakewood Ranch.

The attraction of the game is that a diverse group of players in terms of physical size can participate. “It’s fast, you don’t have to be big,” he said. “In fact, being small can be an advantage. You have contact. It’s a lot more fast-paced than baseball.”

The game has been more popular in the Northeast, Stephens said.

The players “have embraced the sport like you wouldn’t believe,” said assistant coach Garrett Harte, whose son, Jonathan, plays on the Manatee team.

“Most of the kids have not seen a stick until this year,” Harte said. “We’ve got a few that have been playing on some clubs in the area.”

The skills required include stick-handling, and then it’s about learning the strategy, he said. Regarding the ball, “you run with it, pass it, pick it up” with the stick, and can kick it away from you, but players don’t usually score goals by kicking the ball into the net.

The team has a 14- or 15-game schedule this year, and so far has played a few of them; up to Thursday night, though, the team hadn’t won any of those contests.

There are some advantages of lacrosse, several people said. The cost of equipment isn’t that high, with sticks running about $40 or so, plus the cost of shoulder pads, helmets and gloves. Another interesting fact is that players of other sports find lacrosse a good way to stay in shape in their offseasons and can even bring skills from other sports, especially hockey and soccer, to their play.

Still, even with the team charging players $350 each, the coaches have had to supplement that amount to field a team.

For those in the stands, the game is worth the time and effort.

Mark Jernigan, whose sons Tate and Dixon play on the Manatee team, said it’s been fun for the kids.

“Tate’s a senior and he hasn’t done much organized sports since he was a little kid, but he’s excited about this,” he said. “We’re surprised to see how excited he is about it, and it’s great to see your kid excited about something.”

Like others at the game Thursday night, he didn’t have much knowledge of the game but found it exciting to learn. Though it’s a new team, and it hadn’t won any games, “it was really neat to see the whole team’s attitude about that,” Jernigan said. “They don’t just look at what the final score was but you hear them talking about how ‘we were better this game in this particular area, or we see improvement in that particular area.’

“They’re not just interested in winning, but in getting better and growing closer as a team.”

Stacey Jernigan said it actually was the younger son, Dixon, who was interested originally in the club. “It’s been really great,” she said.

Before the game, Tate, 17, a senior at Manatee High School and defenseman, said he loves the game.

“It’s our first year that we’ve had a team, so I figured I’d give it a shot,” he said.

He’d like to play in college, he added.

Some of his fellow students have no idea what lacrosse is, Tate said, but others think it’s cool.

“We’re trying to get as many people to come out to the games as possible and support the team,” he said. “It’s free, it’s fun to watch and it’s a blast.”

The game against Clearwater showed some rough spots still to be worked out on the Manatee side, but the team played hard. The physicality showed when a Manatee player took a hard hit and was down for a few minutes, but then came back up and was sent to the bench for the rest of the period to recuperate, and a Clearwater player suffered a shoulder injury and had to be taken to the hospital.

Hard contact is common and the penalty boxes were in use for most of the game for illegal hits and other infractions.

At the end of regulation time the score was tied 2-2. Spectators wondered about the overtime rules but cheered Manatee on as the players tried to score the winning goal. Cheers erupted after Trey scored the game-winner, and the Manatee players were happy about their first victory.

Sitting on the ground and nursing some soreness was Nick O’Neil, 19, a senior at Manatee High. “I give Trey a lot of credit,” he said. “That was an awesome goal.”

Among those who also played was Kyle Mauk, the center on Manatee High School’s football team, who received his ring for the football team’s recent tournament run earlier Thursday night.

“It was good, our first win,” he said. “I hope we can continue.”

Stephens, the Manatee coach, beamed as he walked among the players.

“I feel awesome. I feel great for the boys. They played their hearts out. They played smart,” he said. “It’s like it started to click. I’m very proud of them.”