It was a close game as the whistles blew. I was exhausted but didn’t want to show it. It felt like I was useless and my hard work had gone to nothing. My team was lining up to shake hands with the opponents. I didn’t know what I did wrong. My dad always told me “practice made perfect,” but it didn’t. I had this rage inside of me and I didn’t know what to do with it. On the way back I did not say a single word to anyone. I was disappointed and I knew I had to do something about it. Let's go back in time just a bit to explain the story.

My name is Mac Lee I am a senior attending Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg Virginia. I am from South Korea and have lived there my whole life before coming to VES. Some things I did at VES included playing lacrosse with my friends and trying to make a great community overall. Lacrosse was a sport that I never knew for the past 14 years of my life in South Korea. When I first came to VES there were a lot of new things that caught my interest and one of them was lacrosse. At first, seeing a lacrosse game made me think it was a violent sport because I had never played a sport with a lot of contact and physical activity. However, I always remember what my dad taught me when I was little, he said “ When you get a chance always do it no matter what it is or what it takes”. So after learning more about lacrosse and playing it more with my friends, I started to get into lacrosse more and more until I was locked into the game of lacrosse and woke up every morning to play it. 

In my freshman year, I didn’t even know what position I was suitable for playing in Junior Varsity. Coach told me that as a new starter, I had quite good stick-handling skills and a pretty good sense of dodging which meant that I was an attack man. I played hard and learned a lot of things throughout the season even though I joined the team a bit late. I always thought that I had to practice more than any of my teammates because I didn’t want to slow the progress of my team. So I worked hard: waking up at 6 am every morning shooting, doing wallball, and practicing dodges by myself or with a friend. This made me confident enough to think that I was going to have a decent performance in the last game we had for our season. 

The game was a big game against Blue Ridge which was a Division 1 school and had a lot of solid players on their team. It also was an away game which kind of brought us a disadvantage considering that the bus ride takes about two to three hours of climbing up mountains to reach Blue Ridge School where there is not even cellular data. They had a nice turf field set up for the game and a few fans cheering for them on the sideline. I was ready because it was my only chance to show the coach what I had done this entire time and proving him that it was a good choice to put me on the attack side of the game. When the game started, we passed the ball around and time flew past. Around the third quarter, I received the ball from one of my teammates and I got this weird confident feeling through my body telling me that I could go through the defender and score a goal. So as anyone should do, I tried dodging the defender and scoring a goal. It might have seemed perfect in my imagination, however, it was quite different when there was an experienced defender with an 8-foot-long pole swinging at you while you were trying to go through him. I quickly realized that something was wrong after getting swung on my shoulder with a metal pole, and backed off and passed the ball away. I was confused I thought that I had a pretty good sense of knowing how to dodge defenders, however, I wasn’t able to dodge a single defender in the game. This made me think about what I did wrong and what I could do to improve my skills. Our goalie, Alfredo, had some really good saves but it just wasn’t enough for all of the shots zooming at 60 miles per hour from every direction. At that moment, I remembered all the things coaches taught us like the drills and the plays we could do throughout the game. When you learn the drills and plays you think it is really easy and it is possible to do it right in a real game, however, I was wrong we couldn’t even pass the ball around properly which made us look like players who’d just got their hands on the stick. The score was 4:0 at halftime. The coaches were mad at us for not focusing on the ball and not showing what we can do. It was our last chance to prove ourselves to the coaches.

The next quarter started as the other team players came up the field laughing and joking, which made us feel really fired up. We played better in the last half, scoring a goal at the start from a fast break. After we scored a goal we thought it was possible to catch up, but Blue Ridge was not a team to just let you score and catch up to them. They scored back right away, making the goal we scored useless. As time went on, we went back and forth attacking and defending, amounting to nothing. Then about 10 minutes before the game ended, Charles caught the ball behind the goal, dodged a defender, and shot at the goal. We all heard the clear noise of the ball hitting the pipe of the goal which meant the ball bounced back out. Then, the referees stopped the game claiming that it was a goal which surprised our coaches and me. What happened was the ball hit the inside pipe of the goal and hit the outside part of the goal which is referred to as a double pipe in lacrosse. Double pipe shots are not a shot that happens every game because you have to aim perfectly at the pipe of the goal and it needs to bounce back to another pipe hitting both of them at the same shot. When I heard about this it felt like god was watching down on us and giving us our final present. After the immaculate goal, the game ended with a score of 2:6. 

Even though we fought hard, we lost the game. But I wasn’t sad because we lost the game. I was disappointed that the hours I put into lacrosse throughout my whole spring didn’t have any impact on the result of the game. I felt like I was nothing... I thought of all the kinds of things I could have done not playing lacrosse throughout the whole two to three months of grinding. The loss of the game bothered me for about two weeks or so. This also taught me a new lesson. “Even though you work as hard as you can there is going to be someone better than you somewhere around the world so never stop until you get on top.” Even though I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the top of the world, setting a goal as high as possible would bring me up to the highest point in life. This lacrosse season was a lot of learning and fighting back for my love of sports. I am going to try harder to do more things that I have never done before and learn a lot of things while doing so.

As the sophomore year started lacrosse was way more comfortable for me as I was no longer the freshman who had just started lacrosse who didn’t know what was happening. Also, there was a really big change to my position as I got introduced to a faceoff specialist by my friend Nathan Pickerd. Faceoff specialist is a position where you start off the game going against each other in the middle of the line trying to get possession of the ball. It was really interesting because it was all about small details of what you do and how fast you react to the whistle of the referee which might win you the ball. This really got me into lacrosse as it was a special position that not a lot of players did and also I had a good reaction speed against whistles. Nathan and I started to really grind out throughout the sophomore year and season. Faceoff was like a new path to lacrosse because it made the sport fun for me again and helped me learn about lacrosse a lot. This helped Nathan’s stats a lot as he went 38% against players in faceoffs his freshman year but now as the sophomore season ended he had a percentage of 60% which is a huge difference from last year. Also, as a backup faceoff, I had a percentage of 78% which was high compared to other lacrosse players who started to face-offs a year ago. 

Lacrosse helped me find a new part of myself and also introduced me to a brand new sport I like to play. I plan to go back to Korea and try to keep playing lacrosse so that I can improve my skills for next season. I hope I can play more lacrosse throughout my high school career and improve more and more.