Box lacrosse is back in Okotoks – it just looks a little different right now.
Thanks to a dedicated membership and volunteer effort the Okotoks Raiders Lacrosse Association has been back scrimmaging at the rec centre for a few weeks now after being sidelined due to the COVID-19 pandemic at the outset of evaluation season in mid-March.
“I think our board has been supportive of the idea of putting some sort of lacrosse together,” said ORLA president Brent Robinson. “I think it was important that we did that. We were kind of lucky to both have the financial resources and the people resources to be able to have that come together. I don’t know that every other club had that luck.
“The first challenge was when everything got cancelled we were right in the middle of evaluations, we had half our evaluations, picked half our teams, that kind of stuff.”
The ORLA initially got started with non-cohort skill and drill work outdoors in late June and were able to advance to indoor cohort non-socially distant program on July 13 inside the Murray Arena.
“We don’t usually do outdoor stuff, that’s kind of the nature of box lacrosse,” Robinson said. “But we were looking to comply with the requirements and provide an opportunity for the players so we had to do what we had to do.”
The move to the natural indoor field of play for box lacrosse has seen registration hover around the 50-55 mark for the weekly sessions inside the Okotoks Recreation Centre.
The athletes are split up into two age based groups for 4-on-4 scrimmages.
“It’s basically been competitive scrimmages, but we don’t really keep score or have a league,” Robinson said. “It’s just in house, mostly Okotoks, it’s been available for South Calgary and we’ve had one player from Strathmore come around.”
For Raiders goaltender Austin Manning the new format has been an enjoyable, if different, experience.
"It's been good, but it's been hard because I'm not able to see my whole team," said Manning, a 12U goalie. "I was super excited because I made the team I wanted and I've been training all winter, with camps, and when COVID hit lacrosse was gone so I was kind of upset.
"When outside (lacrosse) came on I was excited and wanted to play."
Third-year Raider Alex Perkins said the return to the lacrosse has been awesome.
"I was kind of bummed out when I realized we weren't going to have lacrosse this year," said Perkins, a 14U player. "We had one evaluation (in March) and when we did one I thought wow lacrosse is actually going to happen this year and it didn't. The day we found out we weren't going to have a season I felt like I was missing out on an entire year of lacrosse. I didn't think there would be any camps like this.
"It's super fun to get back and a lot more fun than I actually remembered, that's because I think I've been out of it for a few months. Being able to have full game running, working on our skills, what we've practised, what we did outside, it's super fun and most of the time I feel like I'm actually playing a season."
The registration is about a quarter of what a normal box lacrosse season would bring for the Raiders, a figure that Robinson attributes to a few factors including the change in schedule occurring during holiday season in the summer, cohort regulations not allowing for athletes to compete in more than one sport as well as some families not yet comfortable with returning to athletics.
“My hope and my view is that it creates a little bit of normalcy in a situation where there’s not a lot of normal these days,” Robinson said. “To be able to your teammates that you weren’t able to see for three months, when we started in June by that point, to get physical activity in that kind of group setting at least gave them a sense that normal was coming back and that there would be normal and lacrosse there for them.”
Going forward, the Raiders are looking to expand the programming into the fall at the Crescent Point Regional Field House with the particulars still to be determined.
“We’ve got space booked at the field house starting in September and it will just be a question of what the community wants, what kind of registration numbers we get,” he said. “And what makes sense to offer them we will offer.”
For more information go to okotokslacrosse.com
