Sports sanctionings to affect local lacrosse team

The Nebo school district will soon be making a decision that will drastically affect dozens of young athletes that play for the Spanish Fork Warriors lacrosse team. Nebo School District members will vote later this month on whether or not the district will sanction lacrosse as a high school sport.

The Spanish Fork Warriors lacrosse team is a club team. Less than a decade old, the team won its first D2 championship in its inaugural season. Through efforts led by Bill and TJ James in the program’s early years, the team gained traction in the Spanish Fork area and has since seen many young men go through its program. The team now awaits an important decision that will be made by the Nebo school district — to sanction, or not to sanction lacrosse.

Though sanctioning the sport would mean the Warriors lacrosse team would have to dissolve because its player would have to play for their respective high schools, team members know this is what’s best for the sport of lacrosse in the school district.

“The only way our sport will grow is by receiving support of the high schools,” Nicole Norris, a long time Warriors parent, said. “We understand the Warriors will have to dissolve. We know it’s inevitable that it will happen, but it’s a greater good for the sport of lacrosse in Nebo.”

Though sanctioned by the state, the Nebo school district has yet to sanction the sport. Budgeting restrictions and lack of fields have been concerns for the Nebo school district since lacrosse became the 11th sport sanctioned by the Utah High School Athletic Association. Some of these concerns can perhaps solve themselves, as Norris said the Warriors have become accustomed to playing on city fields or wherever space allows them.

“Within Spanish Fork City, the youth program plays on a city field,” Norris said. “We (also) just played Bountiful on a city field. Not preferable, but an option.”

Without sanctioning from the school district, Warriors lacrosse would be faced with difficult circumstances. The 2019-20 school year will be the first season that other school districts will be playing sanctioned high school lacrosse in Utah. If the Nebo school district decided against sanctioning, the Warriors would lose their main competition. Games would then have to be played against other unsanctioned teams spanning from Idaho to California, which would mean travel expenses and time that neither the athletes nor their parents have.

“We have always played the teams in nearby districts because all of the teams have been club teams even if they were represented by a high school name,” Norris said. “Now that districts have sanctioned, our usual competitors will be sanctioned, but unless Nebo district sanctions this coming year also … the players from all Nebo high schools won’t have representation.”

Jacob Green, a soon-to-be senior in high school and member of the Spanish Fork Warriors, said that if Nebo doesn’t sanction, the Warriors will be stuck playing just seven or eight teams, with most of those teams being two or more hours away. In addition, only one of those teams was a top-ranked team last season.

“We’d only have one team with actual competition,” Green said. “The other teams, we would kind of just roll over them, and that’s not why we play the game.”

Green said his life would “totally change during (his) senior year of high school,” alongside his hopes of playing lacrosse in college if the sport doesn’t get sanctioned. He added that lacrosse is both physically and mentally demanding, teaching him lessons that he would not have learned otherwise, also teaching him how to cope with life’s difficulties.

Current BYU lacrosse player Jared Kotter is a Warrior alumnus, the only Warrior to ever play for BYU. Kotter said lacrosse is difficult in Utah because most of the major lacrosse programs are on the East Coast. Without the Warriors, Kotter’s life would have been drastically affected.

“I actually don’t know if I would have gotten into BYU on my own without lacrosse,” Kotter said. “Without Warriors lacrosse, my life would have been quite a bit different. Resilience, one, working towards a goal, even when it doesn’t work out. Learning life can be hard and you have to power through it and not complain; those kinds of things.”

With the potential dissolving of Warriors lacrosse, players from the team fear that a large part of their youth and important opportunities will be taken away from them. Sports have a unique way of teaching some life lessons — teamwork, love for the people around you, brotherhood and sisterhood and how to sacrifice for others.

“It’s made me more disciplined,” current Warriors player Aaron Norris said. “If I didn’t have lacrosse, I don’t know what I would do. I wouldn’t have that joy and love for the sport. My lacrosse team has given me a second family. We trust each other with all our hearts.”

Losing lacrosse would mean more than just simply not having athletes on a field, players feel, but would mean life lessons going unlearned and youth being negatively affected by something beyond their control. Players and parents said lives are changed when sports are represented and embodied by human lives rather than small hurdles and dollar signs.