It’s not easy starting any sports club from scratch, let alone in a sport like lacrosse where participation numbers, although growing, are significantly smaller than in other sports such as football or rugby.
The lacrosse community is therefore blessed to have amazing, hard-working, and dedicated people who are willing to give up their spare time and, quite often, money to ensure people have a place to play the sport they love in their local area.
And it seems there’s never been a better time to found your own lacrosse club with several popping up around the country in the past year or so, including Richmond Junior Lacrosse Club and London City Panthers to name just two.
Another such club is the brand new Phoenix Lacrosse Club based in Newbury which was founded by a group of parents and ex-pupils at St Bartholomew’s (St Bart’s) School, Newbury, after the school made the decision to drop competitive lacrosse matches during the school year.
The school will continue to teach lacrosse and Phoenix Lacrosse Club aim to fill the void left by the school by ensuring the continuing availability of competitive lacrosse to the girls who attend St Bart’s.
The club also see a huge opportunity to run an outreach programme to local schools to build up more interest in lacrosse with a particular interest in the feeder schools to St. Bart's, so kids can build some skills before they go to a school that teaches lacrosse as part of the curriculum.
Despite a number of other clubs in the surrounding area, Phoenix Lacrosse Club want to really focus on playing matches at a school level and England Lacrosse can exclusively reveal that their secret weapon, other than a core of dedicated parents who are putting huge amounts of time into building a club with a long-term plan, is hot chocolate (the drink, not the 1970s disco group) which is deployed quite often at training sessions!
And if that isn’t enough to get you excited about Phoenix Lacrosse Club then they’re also looking for any children, not just St Bart’s pupils, who are interested in playing lacrosse to join the club and take part in training sessions and matches.
It’s all going quite smoothly at the minute but it hasn't all been plain sailing as can be imagined when a group of people decide to found a brand new lacrosse club a year or so into a global pandemic.
Alan Moon of Phoenix Lacrosse Club said:
“Ultimately, we did two things: firstly, we said right let's do this and, secondly, from founding the club on 25 November last year we decided to push hard and launch our first training session on 8 January; it’s amazing what you can achieve when you put a stake in the ground.
“I'd also like to acknowledge the fact that the parents basically have zero knowledge of lacrosse, so we have been on a steep learning curve.”
After their first training session a couple of weekends ago, this coming weekend will see the Year 7 & 8s play their first ever match against St Helen & St Katherine.
At the same time, Phoenix Lacrosse Club will be running their first Year 10 and seniors training session, headed by a former US semi-professional player!
All in all, this weekend will see around 33 players representing Phoenix. Not bad for a bunch of lacrosse novices in their third week of existence.
Heading into the future, the immediate priority is to keep competitive lacrosse available to school age children in the Newbury area while also starting to focus on the schools outreach programme and expand from there. There may even be one eye on setting up a senior women’s team so watch this space.
Phoenix Lacrosse Club are keen to welcome players with any and every level of experience and have expanded their coaching team from two to five coaches so they have the breadth and depth to cope with all levels and are able to dedicate one to one time for new players.
Interested players can sign up by emailing the club at [email protected] or by visiting their website HERE and hitting the ‘register interest’ button.