England Lacrosse sat down with England Men’s Indoor (Box) Lacrosse Coach, Andy Downing, not long after he’d stepped off the plane from Canada after a hugely successful 2019 World Men’s Indoor Lacrosse Championships.
England finished fourth, equalling their best finish at a World Championships, and narrowly missed out on a medal, losing by three goals to the USA in the bronze medal game.
This was Andy’s first major tournament as an England coach but as a player, he has had a glittering career, representing the England men’s field team at one European Championships as well as the England men’s box team at two World Championships.
Domestically, Andy has won two NEMLA Senior Flags and a NEMLA Premiership winners medal for Heaton Mersey Lacrosse Club based in Stockport, Manchester.
As well as turning his hand to coaching recently, he is also chairman of Northern Box Lacrosse, an organisation that aims to “bring Box Lacrosse to the masses” with the short term aim of building a full-sized purpose built venue in the South Manchester area.
He was keen to talk about all things box lacrosse, including the fourth-place finish, his experience as a player turned coach, and the future of box lacrosse in England more generally.
Finishing fourth in the end, you must have come home really pleased and really proud of the efforts over the two weeks (at the 2019 World Men’s Indoor Lacrosse Championships)?
Yeah, everyone is. We surprised ourselves and superceded everything we were aiming for. We thought we could do, we could finish fourth, we could get there but the reality of it was just a bit unsure. When we tested the Israelis, and lost in overtime, we were all looking at each other thinking we can do this.
Before that point, you’d never been together as a full entire group so ultimately you didn’t really know where you stood, did you?
Exactly. We played the Aussies in the warm-up week a few days beforehand and they beat us. We were a bit disorganised. It was the first time the team had played together. So, we made a few alterations at the next practice and simplified it. Everyone was a bit excited, a bit nervous. And then we played the Germans in the main arena and the first half we just blew them away. It was good to see it was all working but we still weren’t a “60-minute team”, as it were. We couldn’t do the full game, and the Germans came back.
What was it like getting in that arena? Did it feel completely different to anything you’d been training in before? Did it “ramp it up” a little bit?
Yeah. Well, yeah, going from Tennis Courts up in Disley (Cheshire) to playing in proper venues in front of crowds as well it does make a difference. But the lads all stepped up. It was just being in a professional environment and the coaching staff and the team management helped generate that in the changing room and everyone just stepped up. Gone were the days of the cold winter’s evenings up in Disley or trekking down south to play in a small barn, everything just fell into place. It was good!
Had you and the team set targets before you flew out to Canada?
Yeah, so our expectations before were that we just needed to stay in the blue division. But the flip side of it was: if we do get relegated then it’s going to take us on a different path back here. But going back into the blue division, I think it was the Finland game that solidified our place in the blue division, and we absolutely battered them. It was then that we thought, “yeah, we do belong here”.
Did you feel you’d probably got to that different level from the teams that were playing in the lower groups? You were ready to step it up?
Talking to the Canadian and the USA coaches, we kinda summed up that the Canadians are a second faster, and a second in this game is huge, and the USA are maybe half a second faster, and then the Israelis were the same pecking order as us. In the important games, the crunch games, no matter how many mistakes we were making, we could kinda limit and control our own game and push for the win and not worry about the opposition. Whereas you play Canada and the Iroquois and they’re just, they’re that much quicker and it shows. But going down the pecking order, we had the upper-hand, we were the one second faster team so those split decisions were a lot easier because we were used to playing at a faster pace.
And having played in the two World Championships before this one and now moving to the other side of things, to the coaching side of the game, could you feel a difference? Did it feel a bit strange to you?
It’s hard because all the preparation we’d been doing back home and Walt Christianson, the Head Coach, had been coming over and then he’d been leaving me and saying “right, you need to work on this, you need to work on these things, run these kind of drills, run these kinds of sets. I wanna see people work on this”. We were feeding all of this back to Walt and it’s just a different level: going from a player thinking “oh, I’ll just turn up and do my warm-up and put my kit on”, there’s so much more detail that you have to go into as a coach that I didn’t anticipate at this level and it’s been an absolute eye-opener! It’s been good though.
Having someone like Walt there to direct you and manage over things, is that sort of experience invaluable?
All the coaching staff, Dan (Perreault) and Jordan (Sundher), they just know the game so well that nothing’s new to them. They describe it as a chess game: they’ve always got a counter move and they’re always thinking a few moves ahead. And they just know this so we’re all, the English guys, we’re all thinking immediately whereas they’ve already thought about it and they’re steps ahead and they just filter it into the system, dead calm, dead collected and it really does work. It’s such an advantage having good quality coaching staff.
Looking forward now, how do you build on what you have just done?
Well, while we were out there, Eliot Pugh and myself, we had a few meetings with Jane (Powell, National Talent & Performance Manager) and Mark (Coups, Chief Executive Officer) from England Lacrosse who are very encouraging and want to help and start bringing venues in. All the conversations we had, it all boiled down to “we can do this, we’ve got the coaching staff, we’ve got the time, we can invest it here”, but it all boils down to having a purposeful venue and multiple purposeful venues up and down the UK. That’s something we’re going to start looking closely into.
Ultimately, is it about giving more people the opportunity to play box lacrosse and have a go and to have the facilities to do that.
That’s absolutely right. Look what we’ve achieved playing on tennis courts and under-sized rinks! As you know, we have to compete with the field schedules but we’re going to start implementing more box specific times in-season so when the pitches aren’t ready or its raining or snowing and the games get called off it’ll be structured. We know that sort of thing’s going to happen so why not have a box league in November, December, January kind of time.
I guess what you’ll be looking for next is for there to be more young people up and down the country getting in to box lacrosse and being given the opportunity to give it a go at a junior level?
So what we’re talking about with Southern Box Lacrosse is that because the junior programme suffers down there, I think there’s only Spencer with a junior team at the moment, with the smaller numbers that are needed for box and it’s inside and a lot quicker. The juniors, they play shorter games, this is over in Canada, and they don’t have set positions so everyone does all the positions. You go out of what they call the “back door”, start in defence, move up into transition, and then play attack and come off so everyone gets a feel but they grow up in that system. That’s something we’re going to look at down south.
Down the line, what do you see in five years’ time on a national level for the programme? I know it’s been talked about through the team and coaching staff that the goal is to try and produce a home grown full team. Is that what you see in the next five years, 10 years?
So, we actively want those passport-holding players who are non-residents to come over and engage and spread their knowledge and be part of our culture, attend all the practices leading up to Championships and be more involved over here. But it’s hard when, off the back of the Championships, three of our Canadian players have gone onto rosters for professional teams but it is something we’re strongly thinking about and to have home grown players in five years. If you think about the under 14s, in four/five years they’ll be ready so if that’s something we can invest in now then it’s something that we do want to invest in.