As the winter season runs on for sports, more and more sports will come out to play. This includes boys lacrosse. The lacrosse season is finally back and hopefully better than ever. The Blue and White has interviewed Coach Mitchell and three of his lacrosse players to see how they feel about lacrosse.

We began our interview with Coach Mitchell. When asked what his thoughts were on the previous season, Coach Mitchell stated “Last season was an overall improvement from the 2020-2021 season, especially from a defensive standpoint. We had a decent amount of football players join the team that were never afraid to get physical.”  The expectations for the next season are always important. “I expect to see more consistency and discipline. There should be far [fewer] dropped passes and turnovers this year given the amount of time we spend practicing this part of the game,” says Coach Mitchell. He said that his main goals for this season are to, “Have younger players step up, put the work in at practice, and not rely so much on our experienced players that will be graduating next year. This is the first year since I have been a coach that we have enough players for a JV team, so we will definitely use this year to strengthen our core foundation.” Every coach has trouble every now and then, and Coach Mitchell told us that the hardest part of coaching is to, “teach young athletes how to be confident in themselves and help them understand how much work they need to put in outside of practice to build their stick skills. Any athlete can come from another sport and play lacrosse, but the stick skills are developed through countless hours of simple activities such as wall ball, where you throw a ball off of a sturdy wall and catch it with your stick with both dominant and nondominant hands and cradling the ball in your stick around the house.”

Next, we interviewed Sophomore Matthew Touchet. We asked Matthew what made you want to join lacrosse and why. He told us that he “originally wanted to join lacrosse because it seemed like a very interesting and fun sport to be a part of.” Sports are usually hard to pick up, and this is no different for Matthew, as he stated that,  “The most difficult part of lacrosse is probably shooting. The goal is pretty small so the goalie takes up the majority of the goal. It’s also hard to get a clear shot without getting hit.” Matthew told us that he’s looking forward to “this season’s games, I’ve been playing all year since last season when I started lacrosse, so I’m excited to get back into high school action.”

The next player interviewed was Sophomore Nick Lucas. Nick explained that he decided to play lacrosse because he was “just trying different sports, and one day I found lacrosse. Ever since I found it, I’ve liked it.” We questioned Nick on how difficult lacrosse is for him, he told us that “The most difficult thing about lacrosse for me is how fast the games go, due to the speed of everyone and everything.” Nick told us that he’s looking forward to “The team growing will all the new players and people.”

The last student we interviewed was Sophomore Brennan Walsh. While talking to Brennan, he told us the reason he joined lacrosse was that he, “saw my friends were playing it and I wanted to play a sport, so I joined lacrosse.” We questioned Brennan about why he thinks lacrosse can be difficult. Brennan explained, “The most difficult part is getting to know how to actually play, you might know the basics on how to catch and throw but it’ll take a bit to fully understand how the game works and what to do and when to do it.” The last question we asked Brennan was what he’s looking forward to the most this season and he told us that he’s looking forward to “Getting to play with all of my teammates and friends.”

These players are ready to go and make the best out of this season. Come out to support the Apopka Boys Lacrosse as they play. The list of their upcoming games is down below.