Hoosac Valley Girls Lax Program Growing, Gaining
CHESHIRE, Mass. -- Most of the players who will lead the Hoosac Valley girls lacrosse team into the Central/Western Massachusetts tournament this month can remember a time when the tournament was the furthest thing from their minds.
“When we started, we were all new,” said Anjelica Tanguay, a junior who started with the team in eighth grade. “Nobody really knew how to play. It wasn’t awful, but obviously we were all new. The other teams were more developed. They all knew what they were doing.
“We couldn’t win a game, but now, obviously, we’re getting better.”
Good enough to take an 8-5 record into Monday’s regular season finale at Pope Francis in Chicopee.
The Hurricanes clinched a berth in the post-season last Monday when they beat St. Mary’s of Westfield to guarantee themselves a .500 record.
Last year, Hoosac Valley took its tournament hopes down to the last day of the regular season, when it lost to Pittsfield, 14-13, to finish at 6-8.
“We lost by one goal, but I knew we were going to do it this year because we worked our butts off to get here,” Bri Lancia said.
“[The Pittsfield loss] made me personally want to push myself the hardest I could. I worked all summer at lacrosse to make myself better. I wanted to become a captain this year, so I pushed myself to be a leader for our team.”
Hoosac Valley coach Molly Meczywor says she is blessed with strong leaders on the team. Many, like Lancia, have been around for years and still have a year or two to go with the varsity.
“The good thing about this program is … girls are allowed to play in seventh grade,” Meczywor said. “You think about Alie [Mendel] and Claudia [Bressett], who are two of the top scorers in the county, and they’ve been playing since seventh grade.
“That definitely helps with the progression because we start a majority of sophomores.”
Of course, some of those sophomores have been starting for years -- by necessity.
“In my first game in eighth grade, I was playing varsity, and I had no idea what I was doing,” Tanguay recalled.
“When I started, we did not have enough players to have a JV team,” Lancia said. “We barely had enough players to have a varsity. We had maybe four subs. It’s crazy to see how popular the sport has become and how much girls enjoy it.”
Several of the Hoosac Valley girls will enjoy lacrosse beyond the spring season -- whenever that season comes to an end.
“There are five of us who play for the Berkshire Attack out of Pittsfield,” Skylar Case said. “Girls from all over Berkshire County play, and we go to New York and play games against some really good teams, against some girls who go on to play Division I.
“There’s a youth league and a high school league. We play our own games at Kirvin Park. We work on skills. We can play anywhere [on the field], just to get a feel of what it’s like to play, I don’t know, attack, or D-wing, stuff like that.”
“I think the summer team last year helped me quite a bit in getting my left-handed cradle and right-handed cradle stronger,” said Aubrey Rumbolt, who started with the Hurricanes five years ago when she was an eighth-grader.
Rumbolt and Brooke DiGennaro are the only Drury High School students on the team, a cooperative program between the two schools.
It is less of an issue than some might think for students from the North County rivals to join forces on the field of competition.
“The other day in school, I got a question from one of the underclassmen who said, ‘Is it weird to play on a team with our school’s rivals?” Rumbolt said. “And I never even thought of the question before.
“I get comments when I wear a Hoosac shirt in school, but I never think of it like that. The girls are amazing. It never feels like a rivalry when I go to the Hoosac lacrosse team.”
Drury made one other significant contribution to the team: Meczywor.
“When I was the athletic director at Drury, [Hoosac Valley’s Dayne Poirot] said, ‘We need a girls lacrosse coach,’ “ Meczywor said. “And I said, 'No, I don't know anything about lacrosse,' and he said, 'It's just like soccer. Just do it.' I didn't do it that year, and then the next year he said, 'We need a girls lacrosse coach. Just do it. It's so much like soccer. You already know how to run a program. It'll be fine.' “
That time, Meczywor said yes, but she had an ace in the hole, a teacher at Drury who knew the sport … sort of.
“Zach [Sondrini] was a teacher at Drury at that point, and I knew he had a deep background playing boys lacrosse,” Meczywor said. “It's a whole different game, but he said at least I can teach the skills and fundamentals part.”
Sondrini, now the boys varsity head coach at Wahconah and now Meczywor’s brother-in-law, said he is thrilled to see his former team reach the tournament.
“I learned about head coaching working under Molly at Drury as her JV girls soccer and then along side her at Hoosac girls lacrosse,” Sondrini said. “Molly is great at running programs and in this case building them from the ground up. I always understood the X's and O's of lacrosse but my sister-in-law Molly really showed me the other side of building a program that head coaches have to put together.
“It's a balance of getting parents involved, fund-raising, team building, youth program engagement and making each player important to the growth of the program all while putting a competitive. A lot of the ideas that we currently embrace at Wahconah boys lacrosse are things that I took away from my time coaching with Molly.”
Sondrini also noted that the Western Mass tournament will be a true Sondrini-Meczywor family affair with Molly’s son Casey playing for the 9-4 Hoosac Valley boys team.
Meczywor said that parental involvement has been a key to the success of the Hoosac Valley girls program as its fund-raising efforts have kept pace with the players’ growth on the field.
That growth has taken the Hurricanes from a near automatic “W” on an opponent’s schedule to a program that other teams have to respect.
“We beat Wahconah that [first] year,” she said. “That was our only win, and you would have thought we won the world title. … Every year, we went from winning one game to winning four games and then maybe four years again and last year we won six. This year, we're 8-5. It's been that progression.
“A lot of the lumps that we took over the past couple of years, the girls felt it. They felt the frustration. For them, getting into the tournament was very rewarding because it was like our hard work paid off.”