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Summer Lax Tourney Series: War on the Shore – Long Island!

Long Island is a hot bed area for lacrosse.  Always has been and always will be.  However, what always struck me as weird was the lack of quality lacrosse tournaments over the summer on “the Island”. 

Along with the Greenport tourney which was started a couple of years ago, tournaments have started to pop up all over the Island and one of these is the War on the Shore Long Island put on by Port Jeff Sports. 

The tournament was a one day affair and took place on Sunday June 7th, 2009 in Mattituck, which is located on the Eastern end of the North Fork of Long Island.  This was the first year of the tournament and since the Southampton Brewery is located only 40 minutes away, the team thought it would be a great chance to play close to home and help spread the game to the East end.

Rob Fortunato about to make ANOTHER saveEach team played 4 games over the course of the day and the two best teams were selected at the end of the day to play in the Championship game.  Initially, myself, Striding Man and Mr. Blue Sky were all set to play for Southampton but due to a faulty alarm clock, Striding Man and Mr. Blue Sky were unable to make it out there.  I picked up my college teammate, Chris Mele, in Brooklyn at 5:30am and we headed out East on the Long Island Expressway. 

2 hours later we rolled into Mattituck for our 8am game against Slash and Burn.  They were young and fast while we were more “experienced” but we were still able to come out on top 9-6 behind excellent play from our 2 goalies, Rob Fortunato (UVa) and Kayser Dixon (retired), who split time and kept us in every game we played.

At 10am we played Shooter’s Paradise, a club madeSouthampton D settles inup primarily of Ward Melville HS graduates of the past 30 years.  For those of you that don’t know LI lax that well, Ward Melville is easily one of the top programs on the Island.  The game didn’t end up that close as Southampton rolled on in the win column.  The first game we played was on a nice short field.  The second game however was on a field that was easily 130yds long from endline to endline. The fields were right next to each other so I don’t understand the drastic differences between the two but I was just happy to be playing lax on a beautiful day and putting one or two in the net from time to time.

Our 3rd game was against QuickStix and they were also young and fast and played with a lot of intensity.  They even had a sizable cheering contingent made up primarily of parents… but they were certainly vocal!  Quickstix had about 5 players from Wesley College, which is a Div 3 school that plays in the CAC with Salisbury and Stevenson.  Wesley has awesome helmets.  We were pretty worn out from playing a game immediately before on the super long field and dropped a game to Quickstix 10-5.  We were all pretty exhausted so we sought out as much shade as we could and hydrated like crazy.  For our last game we play Lily Flanagan’s.  LF is a bar on Long Island that sponsored this team and Southampton came out hard and strong and won easily.

Shannon Sturz came up big time and time again for the BreweryFor the Championship game Southampton made it in at 3-1 while Quickstix made it in at 4-0 with a win over Southampton, however, Quickstix had to play a qualification game right before the Championship game.  The fortunes were reversed when it counted and the Quickstix guys were clearly still tired from their last game.  They had some good opportunities in the first half but Rob Fortunato was there again making save after save and only allowing 1 goal in the first half.  Southampton led 3-1 at the end of the first and kept scoring in the second to win the Championship 8-4.

Overall, it was a great day with really good weather and some great summer lax… coming out on top never hurts either!

Lily Flanagan’s vs. NY Orcas another Championship shot