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Spartans 2.0

On Thursday,  I participated in my first ever practice as a coach.  As promised, I’ll give you a behind the scenes peek as we build our program.

I started the job at the beginning of August and my first task was to find a deal on some team gloves.  I put out an APB on the good ol’ twitterverse and got two responses. One was an offended TizzleSTX, who didn’t like the companies I included in my twit. Not a big deal. I’d be surprised if he weren’t. The other was a company out of Denver named Harrow Sports.

Now, I’ve never worn or used anything produced by Harrow, but everything I’ve seen from them is quality merch. In our original discussion of a team glove order, I had the following mockup produced. Keep in mind, G lax will not be wearing this particular mockup.

UNC Greensboro Glove Mockups for 2011.

Not bad for a local custom glove, right?

Well, Harrow had other ideas. As of September 1st, UNCG lacrosse is the newest member of the Harrow family with an exclusive apparel sponsorship. Easily the biggest accomplishment I’ll have this year as a coach.

You’ll get to see more mockups of our official gear as I receive them. We’re getting new home and away uniforms, pinnies, practice shorts, a long sleeve dri-fit t-shirt, a hoodie, and the staff is getting polo shirts.

Now, on to my first practice.

Coming off of last season, we lost a lot of players to various issues. The two biggest losses, in my opinion, were attack Chris Jones and defender Kyle Campion, both to graduation. From last night, I saw we have at least one quality replacement for Camp, specifically a pole from the 9th best high school in PA, Downingtown West. We also have a middie who came down from Rockville Maryland who looks to be solid.

It's true. It's all true.

Another new addition to the team is Matt Ward, a former Greensboro College long pole who has agreed to come out as a coach on staff. He brings a considerable amount of knowledge to the team and I see his addition as nothing but a positive.

Next week brings a team bonding opportunity as we are going out to dinner on one of our off nights. Then we get back to it on Thursday leading up to our first game of the fall on Sept 25th at App State, who we lost to 9-8(OT) in the regular season last year.

UNC Greensboro brings it in for a post-practice ray-rah-rah.

MCLA D2 news/notes:

Word on the street is North Carolina is hosting its biggest weekend of MCLA play this season. The weekend of Feb 26 will have quite a few matchups involving top5/top10 teams. Two-time Defending champ St. Thomas is flying down to play Elon, Dayton(a rematch of the Tommies first title win), and Charlotte(a rematch of a 3OT thriller from 3 years ago). Dayton will be playing Elon and UST, and declined a game vs Charlotte, but I’ll discuss that more in just a bit. Elon will be hosting the games and unless I have a game that weekend, I will be on site getting video and interviews with the coaches/players for your viewing pleasure.

Now, more on that Charlotte/Dayton game. Charlotte will be traveling to Ohio this season to return a game from last year with John Carroll University. It’s looking like Dayton doesn’t even want to play Charlotte in their neck of the woods, which I can see both the positives and negatives of. Should the Dayton game fall through, their back-up game will still be against a top 10 team. Hint: one of their players made our Player of the Week award.

Hopefully in my next post, I’ll be able to share some looks at our gear.