Season to Season

Pats' two-sport stars building a pair of powerhouses

Posted 9/2/14

A lifelong soccer player, Pilgrim junior Hannah Page started playing lacrosse only last year. Before long she was scoring goals and playing crucial postseason minutes.

“It’s basically soccer …

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Season to Season

Pats' two-sport stars building a pair of powerhouses

Posted

A lifelong soccer player, Pilgrim junior Hannah Page started playing lacrosse only last year. Before long she was scoring goals and playing crucial postseason minutes.

“It’s basically soccer with a stick,” Page said.

She’s not the only one who picked up on the similarities. In fact, she’s far from the only one, and the connection between the two sports has created a run of success that is unparalleled right now in the city of Warwick.

The girls’ lacrosse team has made consecutive trips to the Division III championship game, while the girls’ soccer team has reached the Division II semifinals in back-to-back years.

Across the entire city, only the girls’ co-op hockey team had a more successful season than Pilgrim’s two budding powerhouses last year.

The two teams – and their successes – are uniquely tied together.

Nine players from Pilgrim’s lacrosse team this past spring are currently playing on this fall’s soccer team, and three more graduated who had played both sports for the school last year.

One sport ends, and before long, the other begins. The only thing that seems to change is which ball they’re trying to get past the goalie.

“I think the friendships and the relationships that they build here, they kind of want to duplicate that again,” said Tom Flanders, the head coach of both the soccer and lacrosse teams. “They like the fact that they’re together, they’re singing on the bus. They’re doing all those kinds of things. I think it’s a good thing, and in this case too much of a good thing is a good thing.”

Flanders is at the forefront of the link between the two sports. A longtime coach who helped found the lacrosse program four years ago, Flanders took over the soccer team in 2013 after moving over from Warwick Vets and is currently in his second year at the helm.

The significant crossover among players is directly tied to his coaching. Once he took the reins of the already successful soccer program, players quickly began to try their luck at both sports rather than just one.

“We miss him after soccer, before lacrosse,” said senior Madison Almonte of Flanders.

Almonte and Page are joined this year by Sophia DeLuca, Emily Fluette, Emily Heon, Hannah Johnson, Alexia Martins, Arianna Moussaly and Emma Reilly as mainstays on both teams.

Standouts Haley McCusker, Clare Birney and Jen King are three others who made a name for themselves on both fields before graduating this past June.

And Flanders thinks the connection might grow this spring, with some of his current soccer players talking about trying on lacrosse for the first time when the season comes back around.

That’s the usual transition for the two-sport athletes – they grow up soccer players and pick up lacrosse once they get to high school, since there is no option for youth lacrosse in the city.

It’s been a lucrative pipeline. The track record for soccer players turned lacrosse players is a pretty strong pitch. The vast majority of them have picked up a stick and contributed to Pilgrim’s lacrosse success right away, and just playing the game helps keep them in shape for the soccer season.

“I think you look at the passing patterns, the defensive schemes that we do,” Flanders said. “They’re kind of similar things. Being a good soccer player is going to help you.”

A lot of the time, Flanders doesn’t have to be the one making the pitch. The players do much of their own recruiting.

“I think it’s just so many older girls having an influence on the younger girls,” Almonte said. “Since lacrosse is such a new program at Pilgrim, everyone is always like, ‘Come play lacrosse, come play lacrosse.’ It is such a fun sport.”

The winning has certainly helped, too. With an influx of athletes, the lacrosse team has grown at an almost unbelievable rate and figures to be a contender once again this season.

The soccer team, meanwhile, is set to begin its regular season today and will be considered one of the favorites for the Division II championship.

“We take it serious, but we can have a lot of fun,” Almonte said. “And when it’s like that, I think it’s easier to bring the level up like we did.”

The end result is a family-like atmosphere, with Flanders leading the way. Even to an objective observer, it’s easy to see the relationships that have been built on the field and the commitment that the players have to each other in both sports.

“The whole chemistry – you go from the spring into the fall and it’s all the same girls,” Page said. “It makes the sports easier for everyone there.”

The two teams both have been vying for championships and should continue to vie for championships in the coming years. Graduation forces the cast to change from year to year, but it barely seems to change from sport to sport.

“They have other attributes that make them successful in both sports,” Flanders said. “They really do. The girls sports at Pilgrim’s high school, they’re fantastic people and they’re fantastic athletes. Really, the last few years, we’re really blessed with that.”

One thing the soccer-lacrosse players are missing, however, is a title. Lacrosse has come painstakingly close the last two years, while the soccer team was a few bounces away from being in the championship game themselves.

The close calls bind them too. But raising a trophy – or two trophies, for that matter – would bind them forever.

“We’re definitely going for it this year,” Fluette said.

First in the fall, then in the spring.

“This is the year,” Page said. “For both of them.”

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