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Coach Cibe: March Italy Lacrosse Update

Editor’s Note: Please welcome Giacomo Bonizzoni, aka Coach Cibe, back to LaxAllStars.com! Coach Cibe knows as much about Italian Lacrosse as anyone, and is fully dedicated to seeing the popularity of lacrosse explode in Italy. He’ll be updating the LAS nation on Italy’s Lacrosse progress with monthly posts!

Make sure you also check out Coach Cibe’s website – CoachCibe.it! It’s a great read and full of information!

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Lacrosse in Italy is not just men’s territory.

Women’s lacrosse is growing fast! At the moment there are two teams, one in Milan (Baggataway Milano) and another in Rome (Roma Leones Women) with a third team developing in Perugia.

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The board of the new Italian Federation board has appointed Vivianne Vitale as representative for women’s lacrosse with the responsibility of all development over the next four years. The program, just published by Vivienne, is very challenging and is made up of 6 very hard tasks:

1) ELF Umpires training course on march 23th and 24th during the Nettuno Open, an international tournament;
2) Training clinic in Perugia;
3) Organization of the first women’s Italian Cup;
4) A second ELF Umpires training course in October 2013;
5) Develop the first Italian Female lacrosse championship for the 2013/14 season;
6) Hold try outs for the first Italian women’s national team.

There is a lot of work to do but all in Italy have faith in Vivianne and she is incredibly keen to succeed, so we wish her all the best in reaching her objectives.

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Today, we have a brief interview with Gaia Legori, one of the founders of Baggataway Milano. We asked her about the plans and the objectives of her team:

A.S.D. Milano Lacrosse Baggataway is the first women’s lacrosse team founded in Italy in 2009. In 4 years the team has grown considerably becoming ever more popular and their players have gained valuable experience having had the opportunity to play and practice with players from Japan, Germany and the USA.

We have been lucky to have had the opportunity to learn from their precious teachings and improve our skills. This year we were coached by Jenny Beam from the USA but she left us in January and since then we have been coaching ourselves based on drills we found in books.

The two women’s lacrosse teams, Milano Baggataway and Roma Leones are quite distant from each other, thus we don’t have the chance to play many matches. This is the reason that lead us to travel all around Europe to play lacrosse. We have participated in the Trickster’s Cup in Slovakia, the Silesia Cup in Poland and we have recently taken part in two tournaments in Switzerland where we finished in 3 rd place in both tournaments. Our next Matches will be on the 23rd -24th of March at the Nettuno Open, on the 13th of April in Milan against the Zurich Lions and, most importantly, the Mediolanum Cup, the first ever international tournament to be held in Milan on the 8th-9th of June 2013.

For next year the new-elected Italian Federation of Lacrosse is working out a plan to develop women’s lacrosse, which includes a project to form an Italian National Team. Counting half of all Italian women’s lacrosse players, some of which are quite skilled, we at Milano Baggataway are looking forward to seeing this project become reality.

Before I leave you for the month, here is an update of the Italian Men’s Championships:

In the Northern Division, Pellicani Bocconi lead, followed by Red Hawks Merate.

In the Southern Division, the leaders are Roma Leones followed by Phoenix Perugia and Bologna Sharks.

For more, check out Coach Cibe’s Italian Lacrosse Blog. Just click the image below!

Giacomo “Coach Cibe” Bonizzoni
Photo credit Muriel Geroli, Francesca Capriotti