Soccer. Basketball. Swim. Liberty offers a wide range of sports for high school athletes, but lacrosse isn’t one of them. Liberty lacrosse uses Liberty’s name. It is made up of primarily Liberty students, and it suffers with the loss of seniors just like every other high school sport—but it’s not really a Liberty sport.
Liberty lacrosse is a select league, meaning that the team has to do their own fundraising, find fields and times for practice, and they aren’t divided by 2A or 4A sizes.
According to senior Cade Hughes, one of the main reasons that Liberty still doesn’t have a school team is because there aren’t consistently enough players trying out.
“It’s too variable. One year you could have 14 people and barely have a team, and then another year you could have two, almost three teams,” Hughes said.
Unfortunately, this year the team is considerably smaller. Only one freshman tried out, and there are 19 players total.
“We did lose quite a few seniors, which was almost our whole starting lineup,” junior Ryan Russell said.
Additionally, the team has to organize several fundraisers every year to compensate for their lack of school funding. Most of the money in the past has come from their annual auction or clothing drive.
However, in spite of the team’s size and lack of financial support from the school, they continue to remain optimistic about this year’s season.
“We’re confident. We have a really young team this year, and it’s exciting to see how everyone starts out,” Hughes said. “We’ve already played a few games, and we’ve seen the sophomores and freshman getting significantly better and more accustomed to playing.”
Although being a club team instead of a high school team can be difficult, Liberty Lacrosse is looking to expand in the next few years with more incoming freshmen currently playing at the middle school level and could eventually become a school sport.