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