They say the only place that you can go from rock bottom is up. This holds true for the H-F Lacrosse team, which finished its 2025 season with a 1-17 record. With their sole win against Kenwood, it is clear that change is needed. 

The team has some time, as they are young. They lost 16 seniors from last season, and with them, experience and natural skill left as well. 

Despite this, head coach Jason Keane is optimistic about seeing the team’s growth throughout the preseason and the regular season. “[We have] a lot of new players this year who have never really touched a stick before. So seeing them go from very basic and very new to seasoned at the end of the season, it’s going to be great to see,” Keane said. 

Vital to this growth is establishing the fundamentals, especially given that they have about a dozen athletes who have never played lacrosse before. Keane, in preparation for the season, elaborated on the importance of the core aspects of the game to player development. “It just comes down to going back to the basics. We can’t really start getting into anything in terms of how to move on offense, how to move on defense, until we get some of [that] basic pass, catch, ground ball stuff down,” he emphasized.

Senior team captain Emmanuel Wright has been on the team for all four years of his high school career. He agreed that establishing the basics is integral to future success, and he believes in-game IQ also needs to be worked on before the season starts. 

Wright cited that the speed and overall nature of the game is something that takes some getting used to, but overall, he wants the new athletes to understand that lacrosse is a game at the end of the day. “Something I try to instill in [the new players] is that this game is really fun. It just takes a lot of time and commitment to understand,” he stated.

Despite the enjoyment, Wright reflected on his early struggles as a player and how they can get in the way of any in-game pleasure. “I get it, like when I first started, my freshman year, I didn’t know what I was doing. So it was frustrating because I could see all these guys [who] were throwing and passing perfectly fine, but I couldn’t do that. But it takes time, and you’ll get it if you stick with it, and it’s really fun,” Wright empathized. 

Many of the incoming athletes are also involved in other sports. Keane sees this as an opportunity for improvement on the lacrosse field. “We have football players, wrestlers, soccer players [and] baseball players. So just kind of using those skills to translate it to lacrosse, so we can kind of speed up that process of actually becoming a lacrosse player, I think, will help, and hopefully that will transition well to the season,” he confided. 

Keane still wants to see continued growth once the players get more comfortable with the stick. “Last year, towards the end of the season, with having a bunch of seniors and kind of towards the end of [the] year, looking ahead, [we] kind of got a little stagnant towards the end. 
So with a young group and an inexperienced group, just from now until the end of the season, just keep getting better every single day and keep it moving from there.”

To flip the record, it will take more than consistency, though. Wright realizes that. Looking ahead to the season, the team captain already has plans in place to build team chemistry week after week. “As the season progresses, we’ll try to do certain activities, like, especially on days like when the weather is not the best, we might sit down and watch games together and go over [what] the players are doing,” he said.

Wright also emphasized how their team bonding work is bigger than just the team. “We also do charity events. 
So like we’ll help clean up downtown Homewood later this year. So we do all types of stuff, and building chemistry is really important because if you can’t trust the guy next to you, how are you going to trust him in [the] game when you’re trying to pass the ball to him and we’re down and we got to score?” Wright explained. 

The team hopes to see the benefits of their labor first come to life during their season opener on April 11 at Taft High School.