Westminster, Maryland – Carroll County, Maryland is a smaller, rural county just about 40 minutes from the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. Calling it a tad sleepy would be an understatement. I graduated college from a small liberal arts college called Western Maryland College. It is one of the top academic small schools in the mid-Atlantic region and was not known for having strong sports programs when I arrived on campus. Today, 21 years later, the school is nick-named the “Home of Champions” because of the numerous conference titles the school has taken over the past decade and their relationship with the 2000 World Champion Baltimore Ravens who hold their summer training camp at the college (now called McDaniel College). What a transformation! From chumps to champs!

The rolling hills and farmland give way to upscale and blue collar neighborhoods and townhomes as you approach Westminster, the County seat of 25,000 people. The outskirts have become a sort of suburb for the folks who work in Hunt Valley, Owings Mills, and even metro DC.

Lacrosse started here in the late 1980’s and even through the late 1990’s when I was an assistant lacrosse coach at Western Maryland, there was not a tremendous amount of talent. Good or decent, but not great. There were several prospects that could play at the DIII level and some DI players, but there was not a tremendous amount of activity. The boys often opted to play college football vs. college lacrosse if provided the option. They were in the “baby giraffe” stage of lacrosse. Tall, but somewhat awkward in the game. Some great athletes and lots of hard working people helping the giraffe to stand. One program, the Liberty High School girls program, began a dominating run and the passion of the game spread.

Incidentally, my wife Mindy founded a youth lacrosse team in Westminster, Maryland in 1988.

Twenty years later, read what Carroll County Lacrosse has accomplished! The kids of Carroll County are blue collar, hard working, sports oriented people. Mindy and I had the pleasure of living there for many years and in different roles: student-athletes and coaches as well. Now from afar, it sends us great joy to see Carroll County lacrosse becoming perhaps the best county in lacrosse, person for person, in the nation! The following paragraphs are re-printed from a BLOG at US Lacrosse:

A Carroll Tale

posted by Eboni Preston | July 8, 5:10 p.m.

Lacrosse has come a long way in Carroll County (Md.). CheckHers, the No. 1-seeded team in the tournament, and the inaugural US Lacrosse U-15 girls’ national champion won in convincing fashion versus Stars Gold from Virginia. CheckHers is primarily based in Westminster, a town that didn’t even have a recreational lacrosse program until 1998.

I can tell you this because I was on that first team at Gamber and I can verify how much the area has grown since I first started playing. When some coaches formed the first program in our area, our team was inexperienced and young. We would get blown out consistently every Saturday by talented rec programs like Towson or Bel Air, and we would celebrate when we lost by less than 20 goals. Some teams would simply play keep away and pass the ball around us, while other coaches would make their team play left handed to try to limit their scoring.

Needless to say, the only things that teams remembered about Carroll County were that we had cows right beside our game field and that we lived in the middle of nowhere.

Since then, Carroll County has worked hard to produce quality players and establish the game of lacrosse in the area. The CheckHers program actually started out as a local summer league a few years ago. Girls in the area joined the league because Carroll County players would often have to drive as far as 40 minutes to find a pick-up summer league for middle- and high-school girls.

Now the CheckHers program has escalated to a potential powerhouse program and Carroll County has evened the playing field. It is great to see that how lacrosse has grown in that community. It won’t be long until we see many more teams emerge from lower ranks to become a competitive organization and produce numerous high-level lacrosse teams.

Congratulations to both teams for a great championship run and well done to the Check-Hers coaches and players.

Eboni Preston is a graduate of St. Bonaventure University, where she played goalie for the Bonnies. She is currently in graduate school at Endicott College and serves as an assistant coach for the women’s lacrosse team. She is working for the US Lacrosse communications department this summer.

I want to point out in her story this:

“We would get blown out consistently every Saturday by talented rec programs like Towson or Bel Air, and we would celebrate when we lost by less than 20 goals. Some teams would simply play keep away and pass the ball around us, while other coaches would make their team play left handed to try to limit their scoring.”

Isn’t it amazing that the best program in Maryland, and the country, at one time was not competitive. And that time was not long ago. And to think that our 2011 and 2010 teams this year played against Hero’s and Mass Elite and Team Rev and LI Liberty, and all the other big dogs, and was competitive if not better in some instances based on the match-ups.

We sometimes miss the point of the journey. This has all been done before and it will all be done again in the future. It is easy to be a critic of kid’s sports (which is why there are so many issues in youth sports today), but this is a process that starts with hard working, dedicated coaches and kids. It does not happen overnight, but it can happen quickly.

When we were at U-15, I took our LaxManiax U-15 team to watch Check-Hers just warming up before they bludgeoned one of their opponents. They were perfect fundamentally. They were ALL in shape – very little body fat on any of those athletes; You could tell they played a ton and worked their fitness prior to the event. They had good speed and most were on the tall side (they were all 2012’s). What I had the Maniax girls focus on is one thing: their elbos.

They play fundamentally correct lax. I don’t know how many more times I can provide the coaching point “elbos out” to kids in Florida before we actually get it. In stick drills; on the wall; in small games; in real games; in a chalk talk – it’s the number one thing I talk about. And yet I see girls return from practicing with their youth leagues and high schools and they are right back to playing “Barney-ball”, their elbos are glued to their hips. All the glorious drills made by the world’s finest coaches cannot help you become a ‘player’ if you can’t get the simple fundamentals down pat! We invent too many drills that do not address the fundamentals.

At some point, those players who work their passing and receiving techniques correctly will rise up and help Florida become the next Carroll County.

It doesn’t take a huge population base, it just takes strong fundamentals. To get strong fundamentals, you need to have a blue collar work ethic and be willing to stop texting long enough to dedicate the time necessary to actually be ‘great’ at something!

Until then, wins and loses do not matter. It’s all about the journey.

Who wants to go for the ride?