This week at Granada High School Men’s Lacrosse is gearing up for their first game on Thursday against Washington Highschool. After a 15-3 season last year a lot of this year’s Varsity team has some large shoes to fill. With a large number of Varsity players leaving last year due to the large number of Seniors, upcoming Juniors and Sophomores have some proving to do. Interviews from some of the players and coaches will be giving their input on how they think the season will go as it progresses as well as lacrosse as a sport in general.
Granada Lacrosse and their very strong roster last year was a big reason for their success. Players such as Senior Drew Wilkerson and Junior Dylan Godfrey helped lead the team to a 15-3 season with the 3 losses being to De La Salle, Berkeley High and Cardinal Newman in the NCS playoffs which are very strong teams. This year there aren’t any phenomenal players coming up from JV as freshmen or sophomores. While this is not inherently bad, it has led to the varsity team adopting different strategies to enforce its roster.
Granada senior and varsity captain George Esse stated, “This year we are trying to focus more on building our players that aren’t as good and making them into better players. Instead of just being a team of a few star players we are looking to be more balanced and a stronger team and a more tight knit team”.
While the Team is bringing up players from JV a lot of them are students who joined later in their high school career or lack the skills to make the team stronger and more Unified. While improving a certain player a large amount in one season is impossible the basics of Lacrosse. Which is passing, ball control, and field awareness must be second nature.
Granada Assistant Coach Kavan Bagatelos commented on this. “I keep telling these kids to hit the wall, practice their passes, practice cradling. Even just thinking about the sport outside of practice and the plays we run in practice and we would be such a better team. I love the guys that want to be out here but a part of our team is barely thinking about Lacrosse during a practice let alone at home. We do have a very strong team this year without thinking about that and I’m excited to see what these guys do this year.”
“Hitting the wall” refers to throwing a lacrosse ball repetitively to improve upon passes as well as cradling being how you carry the ball when running. This helps new players improve upon their skills to overall improve as a player. Even the extremely good players still practice their fundamentals like passing and cradling and it is essential for a team to be strong. These “less developed” players keep being mentioned but what do they actually say?
Granada senior Cohen Hinckley stated, “After I came back to lacrosse after not playing for a whole 2 years. When I came back, I wasn’t gonna lie, I was pretty horrible. Recently though I’ve been putting in work on my passing as well as cradling and I want to say that I have improved greatly. I don’t wanna make my last year playing lacrosse my worst.”
While the team is looking to do just as good this year as they did last year the future of the Varsity team is very uncertain. With Multiple Very strong skilled defensive players such as Drew Wilkerson, Daniel Miller, Elijah Pangelinan, Harrison Atkins. This means the team will have to draw up a large amount of players from JV. This could potentially be detrimental to the program as a strong defense is just or even more essential than a strong offense for winning games. The high number of Seniors on the team can be seen as detrimental to the future of the Team. There is light at the end of the tunnel as The Team is doing outreach programs such as holding clinics where the Varsity team helps teach younger players in Phantoms, which is a younger league. This might potentially help find new talent as well as create better players that will come play at Granada.Â
Bagetelos stated, “I help out with Junior Varsity and there is a lot of strong strong talent there. There’s a lot of Freshman who haven’t been playing for too long and you can just tell that they want it man. I Honestly think that if we keep getting guys that want to get better the Program will be insane in a couple years”
Overall this year. Granada Varsity will be an extremely strong force on the Field this Year. With a strong Presence of Very good Seniors as well as a lot of Students on the field who want to improve into better players. While there are some kinks that need to be worked out that hinder the overall performance of this team. 2026 could be a continuation of the Momentum that was apparent last year.
