Lacrosse Program Growing At Mentor High

When you ask a lacrosse player why they like the sport, they almost always use the word "different" in their answer.

"It was different. That's for sure," said Ray Roos, who started playing lacrosse in sixth grade. Now he's a senior at and one of the captains on its boys varsity lacrosse team.

His coach, Eddie Bolden, had the same reaction when he played on Mentor High's first non-club team back in 2001.

"It was just different," Bolden said. "No one had heard of it before."

But while the sport may still be unique, it's not as obscure as it was a decade ago. The Mentor High boys team, for example, has 49 players.

Senior Regis Coustillac played lacrosse as a freshman, tried track as a sophomore and has come back to lacrosse as a senior.

"It gave me a chance to play with some friends and with my brother," Coustillac said.

"I like the speed of it," he said. "I think a lot of people don't realize how exciting it is because they're not aware of it."

The Northeast Ohio Conference still does not have enough lacrosse teams for the schools to have a self-contained conference. Consequently, schools tend to play whoever else in the region has a team.

That can lead to some mismatches between fledgling programs and more experienced teams.

For example, Hudson has one of the oldest lacrosse programs in the state. It won state last year. On Wednesday, the Cardinals had a tough 18-2 loss to the defending champs.

Mentor hopes to rebound at 7 p.m. today with an in-city rivalry game against .

A growing program

Bolden realizes that lacrosse does not get as much attention as, say, football or basketball.

"It's harder for us to get the attention because it is so new," Bolden said. "A lot of our kids come from hockey," he said.

He said that hockey and lacrosse do have some similarities. Additionally, hockey parents usually are not scared off by the price of lacrosse equipment.

Bolden also coaches a club hockey team and he noted there is a difference between hockey and lacrosse coaching.

"I do a lot more basic skills training in lacrosse because we do have some people who haven't played before," he said.

However, Mentor lacrosse is growing in popularity and that's partly because the city's youth lacrosse program continues to grow. Mentor has had a middle school program for five years, and this year is the first time they have a league for third and fourth graders.

Bolden said better youth sports programs inevitably lead to stronger high school teams. He used the Cardinals' football and basketball teams as examples.

"Where do these great players come from? Solid feeder programs," he said.

'It's unique'

As practice ends on Tuesday, Coustillac explained why he first got involved with lacrosse.

While he may not actually say the word "different," he expresses the same sentiment as Bolden and Roos.

"It combines the endurance of soccer with the physicality of football," he said. "It's unique. There's not any other sport like it."