Lacrosse League

If you were wearing a light blue Hero's Summer Lacrosse League jersey Saturday on the upper field at Anne Arundel Community College, chances are your team captured one of the five league titles.Tom Prickett's Light Blue team was first of three teams wearing that color to win a title Saturday. Prickett's team preserved its undefeated status and won the Junior Girls Division by turning away a determined Gold team, 16-10.Jennifer Manning led the way for the Light Blue (8-0) with a game-high five goals, while teammates Erin Brunst, Becky Morris and Kelly Myron chipped in with two goals apiece.

"Girls tend to get ignored in sports coverage and sports programs," says Greg Rice of the Mayo Athletic Association. "This program is for them."The program is the Girls Lacrosse League. Registration is from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. tomorrow night at Mayo Elementary School. The league is open to girls born from 1977 and February 1985.Instruction and competition is divided into Peewee, Midget and Junior categories. The Peewee category concentrates on skills and the rules of the game. Intramural and countywide competition increases for the older girls.

The Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association has made a number of changes and realignments for this athletic year and next.In lacrosse, for example, perennial B Conference power Friends has moved to the A Conference, and two-time C Conference champ Annapolis Area Christian, to the B Conference.Also for lacrosse, the A Conference will consist of two five-team divisions, instead of three three-team divisions. Division I is comprised of McDonogh, Loyola, Friends, Severn and St. Paul's; Division II is made up of Gilman, Calvert Hall, Boys' Latin, Mount St. Joseph and St. Mary's.

Freshman attackman Michael Guerin of Kent (Conn.) School has orally committed to North Carolina, joining a select group who have chosen a college before making their official high school debuts. Guerin, a left-hander, is a member of the New England Select Lacrosse League 2016 Black team, according to the league website. He also played on the NESLL under-15 team that took fifth at the US Lacrosse U-15 National Championships last summer. Guerin is a member of the U-15 national team that will compete in Florida this summer.

In the not-so-distant past, college lacrosse coaches didn't need a national road map to track down talented players to fill their rosters. A simple set of directions to Baltimore and New York, which have been, and still are, hotbeds for field lacrosse players, was all they needed.A cursory glance at the lineups of most of the top-ranked college teams suggests that the Baltimore metropolitan area is still the Mecca of the sport, but a closer look at the hometowns listed on these same rosters raises the question: Are other areas catching up?

Duncan Slidell has been to less than half of his club team's lacrosse games, yet on the two occasions he showed up, his coach let him play -- no questions asked.The 1992 Severn School graduate has even skipped games after being too tired from working his eight-hour-a-day, five-days-a-week job.Slidell can moonlight to Vail, Colo. and win a championship trophy with another lacrosse team -- as he did three weeks ago to play with a select, county All-Star squad -- without worrying that his coach will make him run extra laps in practice upon his return.

It's a sport of elegance and rugged jostling, where gallop meets grit at the command of a netted stick. And sure as the daffodils now peek from the muddy ground, spring lacrosse has returned to the Baltimore area's recreational lots.Players ages 5 to 12 suited up for practice yesterday for the second week of the Towson youth lacrosse league's 2 1/2-month season. The league draws 550 boys and girls of the Baltimore area's 15,000 players for weekly games that will start soon.The popular sport -- a modern version of a game played by Native Americans -- is so ingrained in local culture that rosters fill up before New Year's Eve and waiting lists are common in some leagues.

The Upper Chesapeake Bay Athletic Conference will continue to grow this spring. UCBAC commissioner Bob Slagle confirmed last week that boys and girls lacrosse are going to become conference sports for the first time. The change comes because Cecil County has agreed to take up lacrosse as a varsity sport for both boys and girls - which it has never done before. However, the conference alignment will be different from other sports. Instead of splitting teams into the usual two divisions, lacrosse will compete in three groups.

Mount Hebron High has set the standard for high school girls' lacrosse in Maryland. The Vikings have won six straight state championships and turned out numerous solid college players while dominating the sport at the precollege level in Maryland for the past dozen years. Part of that success is breeding travel programs that are extending the sport's traditional spring season to a virtual year-round affair. Two of the programs are intended to teach girls the sport and to showcase the athletes to colleges, their leaders say. The Hero's Tournament Lacrosse Club and M&D Lacrosse have their roots in Mount Hebron and Howard County.

Joe Breschi and Jeff Tambroni haven't actually spoken in the past couple of months, communicating only through a couple of phone messages, filled with words of encouragement and support. But the respective coaches of Ohio State and Cornell, the first two teams to earn their conference's automatic bids to the NCAA tournament, both talked about an emotional -- and painful -- bond that has tied the programs together. A little more than two months ago, Michael Breschi, the 3-year-old son of the Buckeyes' coach, was hit by a sport utility vehicle in the parking lot of his preschool in Clintonville, Ohio.