If you thought lacrosse was a sport reserved for the East Coast Ivy League elite and not California’s Central Coast—then think again.
Come out to the Pioneer Valley High School athletic fields this spring—at night after the varsity sports have wrapped up their practices—and you’ll find about two dozen Santa Maria teenagers chasing a lacrosse ball up and down, donning sticks, pads, and helmets.
They’re part of the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District (SMJUHSD) Lacrosse Club formed last spring through the efforts of Aaron Melancon, assistant football and track coach at Pioneer Valley High School, and now the coach of the SMJUHSD Lacrosse Club.
The SMJUHSD Lacrosse Club seemingly came out of nowhere. Melancon watched his middle school-aged daughter develop a passion for the sport playing for the recently formed Orcutt Youth Lacrosse Association (OYLA), and decided to pitch the idea of a high school lacrosse team to Pioneer Valley students.
“I really knew nothing about lacrosse,” Melancon told the Sun. “But I thought, ‘I’ll see if anyone’s interested at school, and maybe we can expand this a little bit.’”
In his first club meeting at Pioneer Valley, Melancon attracted 40 students—a strong showing. Word spread, and by the next meeting attendance had increased to 60.
“And next thing you know my signup sheet was up to 90 students,” Melancon said.
Throughout California, lacrosse is becoming a staple sport in boys’ and girls’ high school athletics. Since it was added as a California Interscholastic Federation sport 10 years ago, lacrosse is offered at nearly 100 high schools across the state, including at many of the schools in southern Santa Barbara County.
Even so, lacrosse has been slow to travel up to the Santa Maria area. But the recent efforts from community members like Melancon and John MacKinnon, president and founder of the OYLA, are helping introduce this foreign sport to the region.
“The draw of lacrosse is that it’s a contact sport, but it doesn’t have the same concussion and injury risk as football,” MacKinnon said. “And it’s a lot more running and activity than is offered by baseball.”
Surprised by the level of interest in lacrosse, Melancon met with SMJUHSD Superintendent Mark Richardson to discuss the prospects for lacrosse at Pioneer Valley. Making lacrosse an official varsity sport at the school wasn’t feasible—not yet, anyway. It needed to draw sustained interest from students and their families.
But Richardson told Melancon that the team could exist as a “club” under the district’s name. Melancon could host practices at Pioneer Valley and invite interested athletes from other high schools in Santa Maria to participate, but no official games were allowed.
In their first go of it last spring, Melancon held “skill days,” where he taught the fundamentals of the sport—the rules of the game, how to wield the stick, and some basic techniques.
“There are very few of our players who had ever heard of lacrosse before we exposed them to it,” Melancon said.
This spring, Melancon hopes to arrange some “combined practices” with out-of-district schools, such as with Templeton High School’s club team.
“The hope is that our students can play against people who know more about the sport, so they can learn from them,” Melancon said. “Kids get tired of playing themselves.”
Though the initial interest in a lacrosse team was substantial, Melancon has noticed a slide in participation recently when some students grew discouraged about lacrosse not being a “real” school sport.
“They all kept asking, ‘When is this going to be a sport?’” Melancon said. “The challenge is that the kids want to be in a sport where they are wearing uniforms, and there’s a game schedule, and they’re playing other schools.”
Melancon has gone the extra mile to keep the club alive, even helping finance some players’ equipment last spring. Fortunately, the club recently received an equipment grant from the U.S. Lacrosse organization, so players will receive brand new sticks, pads, gloves, and helmets.
On the pre-high school side, MacKinnon founded the OYLA three years ago, and interest from the community has grown every year. This spring, the OYLA has three boys’ teams—third through eighth grade—and two girls’ teams—composed of fifth through eighth graders. Practices for the league begin Feb. 8, and games against South County opponents begin on March 5. Interested families can contact MacKinnon at 714-3003.
Both MacKinnon and Melancon believe that the community is better served if lacrosse can be offered competitively all the way through high school. MacKinnon is hopeful that it’s just a matter of time until the high schools adopt it as a varsity sport.
“That’s one of our long-term goals,” MacKinnon said. “As these kids playing in the OYLA grow up and go on to the high schools, they and their parents will be asking the high schools to add it as a sport.”
MacKinnon thinks lacrosse fills an important need for the high schools, noting that even though student enrollment is much higher today than it was decades ago, the number of sports offered to students have stayed relatively constant.
“There’s a lot more kids I think that are being turned away from doing sports because of that,” he said.
Melancon, coach of the SMJUHSD Lacrosse Club, hopes that the group will turn into a varsity team soon.
“Then somebody who knows a lot more about lacrosse than me can come in and take it over,” he laughed. “What we’re trying to do is show that the interest is there.”
Melancon sees the value that lacrosse brings as an alternative to the traditional sports currently offered.
“As a coach, I see a lot of kids who have some good athletic tools, but maybe the sports that are available to them aren’t what’s best suited to their abilities,” Melancon said. “Just providing another sport for them to play gives them a new opportunity to be confident in something.”
Contributor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Feb 4-11, 2016.