Derek Pieper Memorial tournament

Heading to Tampa with Bamalax U11 and U13 boys as well as our high school girls for the Derek Pieper Memorial Cup. Looking forward to the trip, looks like we have a great hotel close to the fields and Maverik is going to be on hand doing clinics with Dan Hardy, John Gagliardi and Casey Powell. Overall there will be 56 teams on hand, should be a great time !

Last year our high school girls won the tournament and should have a good shot again this year. Our U13 team has been together for a long time and has been able to get a lot of practices in so they should be in good shape to compete for the title. U11 was looking shaky at one point but has really come a long way and did very well a few weeks ago in Atlanta so I'm actually expecting a lot from all of our teams down there. Should be fun !

Heading to Atlanta

Heading to Atlanta tomorrow with the high school Bamalax boys for the Southern Combat. The event is a little different than the tournaments we usually attend since it is really intended for recruiting. Sounds like the organizers of the event have a good amount of college coaches coming so it should be a great opportunity for our boys. It's going to be a long weekend, check-in is at 7AM and warm ups start at 7:30 ! The NCAA coaches will run a team practice and then games begin at 9AM. After lunch there will be a skills session and then more games in the afternoon. I'm looking forward to meeting the coaches and watching our kids play against good competition. Our Bamalax team will be solid, midfielder Trent Chrane commited to Navy last week Trey Atkinson had already commited to Robert Morris University (DI)but John Somerall is still choosing but leaning toward Hampton Sydney and Brendan Conway is still weighing his options visiting Lenoir Rhyne University (DII) this past week. After this weekend I think a lot of our players will get noticed, I'm hoping our younger players do really well to get on the radar for the future and it would be nice if our upper classmen step up and give themselves some more opportunities. On Sunday there will be an all-star game which I think we could have at least a half dozen or more of our kids earn a roster spot in. Well, time to pack....

Full swing

Well, fall ball is well underway with all of our age groups in the Birmingham area playing on Sunday. Some of us high school coaches are coaching JV teams and then getting to play in an "open" division which includes our better varsity players. The games have been a ton of fun and very competitive, some of our high school kids have improved so much over the summer that I'm a little nervous about facing them in the spring during our normal season ! Tomorrow the Washington & Lee head coach, Gene McCabe will be in town running a clinic for 80 of our best players along with the W&L women's coach who will be instructing about 30 of our high school girls. Gene does a great job, I enjoy his coaching style and I'm looking forward to being a spectator tomorrow for a change.

The next event we have coming up in town is a shooting, feeding, defense clinic run by Liam Banks and Andy Bonasera at Birmingham Southern college. The clinic is November 14th at BSC and there will be other former Syracuse players in attendance including recent graduate Pat Perritt who was part of that amazing overtime national championship victory.

Bamalax has been busy this fall with the high school boys and girls preparing for tournaments, the boys will be in Atlanta November 7-8th and the girls as well as our U11 and U13 boys will be heading to Tampa Nov 21-22nd. Looking at my schedule I don't think I have a free weekend for several weekends in a row but we'll manage.

While everything else is going on we are preparing for the regular spring season trying to schedule games, organize fundraisers, get uniforms together, etc. I'm holding a Hoover new player clinic November 15th at Hoover high school to help recruit more elementary and middle school boys and girls to try to keep up with Vestavia and the east side of Hoover which feeds into Spain Park high school. Don't know what we are going to do with all these kids and what fields they are going to play on but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. More to blog about later but got to head back to work...

Lacrosse video game

http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/sports/collegelacrosse2010/video/6232549
Looks like the developers of the 2010 college lacrosse video game are getting close to a finished product. I'm sure the first game will be a little "old school" looking without all the flashy graphics but it's a start. I'm thinking if the sales are good on the first version it won't be long until others jump at the chance to capitalize on the growth of the sport and tap the 10-16 year old demographic. Looks like they did a decent job on the actual realism of the play and the movement, it just looks a little rough compared to todays standards of video games. For me, i just think it will be great for the sport when I see the game on the shelf at the local Walmart !

2010 Maverik Maybach review

All I have to say is "wow" ! I received a sample glove today for the 2010 Maverik Maybach gloves and I have to say, they are awesome. The gloves are extremely soft, they are very comfortable and do give decent protection. The palms are soft leather but do not appear to be as vulnarable as the 2008 K18's that were comfortable but the leather wore out almost immediately. The Maybachs have a small strip of added protection call Shark gel right across the thumb which should help the protection. I'd recommend Maybach's for advanced players, due to their comfort and light weight, they aren't going to have the most protection but definitely more than Brine Silos. The other thing I really like about the Maybach's is that they aren't super tight. The trend seems for glove manufacturer's to make gloves smaller and smaller, King II's and K18's run very small and the new GAIT RECON gloves are rediculously tiny. All the gloves I mentioned are good gloves, it really comes down to what the player feels most comfortable with but I really think Maverik has come up with a winner. If you are reading this blog and you are interested in custom gloves, e-mail sales@bamalax.com and I can help you out.

AHSAA meeting

Had an opportunity to meet with the Executive director of the AHSAA yesterday, along with a few other GBYLA members, and I was very encouraged by his excitement toward lacrosse in Alabama. The AHSAA created an emerging sport category recently and a letter has gone out to schools informing them that they can choose to participate in the sport during the 2010/2011 season. We only need one school to say they will participate when their annual declaration is made (May 1st) for lacrosse to be considered an official emerging sport. Once a school participates they will have to completely adhere to AHSAA rules and regulations but it will not be considered a championship (or varsity sanctioned) sport until at least 10% of schools in the state participate. With Huntsville's growth, what we already have in Birmingham and what is coming in Prattville and Mobile, we may be closer than everyone thinks to that number. The AHSAA won't effect anything below the high school level, all of our current youth programs will stay the same and working within AHSAA rules there may even be opportunity to have recreation lacrosse at the high school level to accommodate players that don't have participation at their schools. The AHSAA has begun preparing and during the meeting the head of officials even passed out federation rule books and other information which shows they know that it's coming and they have a plan in place to be ready for lacrosse. The GBYLA has done a great job working toward this goal and I really feel we are close to taking the sport to the next level which should be exciting to our younger players and parents. Fall ball is finally starting this Sunday, with about 200 new players and many more ready to start playing in the spring we are exploding, can't wait to opening day !

Love the game

It's really interesting being in an area where lacrosse is growing as rapidly as it is. This past Sunday the league hosted a new player's clinic and almost 200 new kids showed up ! We have players being recruited by DI, DII amd DIII schools and we are adding high school, middle school and even elementary school teams. Fall ball is always a challenge because you want to use the time to develop new players but you also don't want to bore veteran players or frustrate them by sticking them on a team with beginners. Some of our kids have the right attitude, they love the game, don't care who they are playing with or playing against, they just want to play. Back in New York as a kid we didn't have the luxury of having organized youth leagues but we never stopped playing. Fortunately I grew up in an area where just about everyone in my neighborhood played lacrosse and we had 6 on 6 scrimmages and sometimes full field games often. The ground was usually the street in a culdesac and we didn't have store bought goals so usually our hand made hockey goals made from left over 2X4's with chicken wire as a net had to do. One of our favorite things to do was to grab plastic milk crates that were about 2'X2', place them about 30 yards apart, get a tennis ball and play what we referred to as box lacrosse. No equipment, modified checking but trying to catch and throw a tennis ball with old school leather and then hit a 2' target from 10 yards or so out made you pretty deadly come the spring season. We'd run around for hours but what else were we going to do without computers, Playstation, 300 TV channels, cell phones and everything else that keeps kids from just playing in the neighborhood nowadays. I'm excited for the start of fall ball, long Sundays ahead for me, 1PM daughter #2, 3PM daughter #1, then 7PM I get to run around with the men and our better high school kids. Should be fun, the fall tells you a lot about who really loves the game, lookinf forward to it