The Vancouver Warriors’ Elite Lacrosse Academy players proved they’ve been taking their practices to heart over the weekend in a mid-season tournament.
The Warriors wrapped up their Elite Academy Winter Tournament over the weekend, with team Charalambides winning both the U11 and U13 divisions.
It’s the inaugural season of the Elite Academy, and it gives children the opportunity to expand their lacrosse skills in the offseason.
Warriors’ defenceman Matt Beers is the Program Director and the rest of the coaching roster includes defencemen Reid Bowering, Jackson Suboch, and Brayden Laity and forwards Adam Charalambides and Dylan McIntosh with guest appearances throughout the season.
Beers said the goal is to teach kids to play the right way and help give kids the tools to make them better players. He mentioned player development was noticeable in the tournament games, and it was an opportunity to see some kids step into leadership roles and others rise to the occasion over the weekend.
“The tournament was awesome,” Beers said. “We have a lot of really strong kids and we have some kids that need more teaching as far as what we’re trying to accomplish, but we saw everything kind of come together with the older kids stepping up and even the younger kids starting to see the progress in what they’ve learned and really implementing it.”
“Seeing all the smiles of the kids and obviously seeing the parents cheering and all the excitement, it was a really cool experience for us to make sure it was a good experience.”
Beers loves the teaching that they do at Elite Academy and seeing the progress the kids make in the first few months of the program.
“For me, it was really nice for me to see in a lot of the games the competitiveness and the ability for these kids to show what they’ve learned,” Beers said. “The development of the kids was really cool to witness.”
The learning curve is high, and Beers says seeing what the kids can do in game situations really shows what they’ve absorbed. Over the second half of the program, the coaches are looking to build on the foundation they’ve created, fine-tuning offensive concepts and skills they’ve been talking about.
“Playing offence the right way is an example of something we’ve been working on. We have all these kids and if you’re an athlete, you can dominate the sport of lacrosse because you can keep possession of the ball. We’ve been challenging a lot of them to work on pick-and-rolls, run plays, to have motion, and not just stand around and watch someone take the ball to the net, we’ve been adding in a lot of structure and I think the structure is hard for kids because it’s thinking while you’re doing,” Beers said.
“We’re starting to see a little bit more familiarity with what we’re asking and intuitive plays that we’ve been trying to teach them and they’re doing them on their own, so I think that was a cool part of this weekend.”
Registration for Elite Academy tryouts next fall will be available in 2025. In the meantime, Winter Camp registration is open until December 28th and you can register for it here.
