Sports

Medfield Boys' Lacrosse Gains Confidence with Win Over Xaverian

Warriors' earn 10-5 victory over strong Xaverian team Thursday.

You wouldn’t expect a program as successful as Medfield High School boys’ lacrosse to be lacking confidence but with a younger team in the fold this season, Warriors’ head coach Bob Aronson has found that to be the case.

“I don’t think they have confidence in themselves or their teammates yet but it’s coming,” Aronson said of his team. “We can see glimpses of it here and there and [they need] confidence in the system. We have a good system that we have developed and tweaked over the years. The defense is pretty steady and most of that experience is coming back and the guys that are new buy in, it’s a pretty simple system.”

That glimpse of what the 2011 Medfield Warriors can be was on full display at Calvin George Fisher Memorial Field Thursday night as MHS defeated a strong Xaverian of Westwood squad, 10-5.

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“That was a nice win for us,” said Aronson. “We are getting a little bit better at practice, a little bit better at playing. We are starting to click now.”

Aronson hopes Thursday’s win over the Hawks (5-3) will give his Warriors’ the boost in confidence they have needed and inspire them to continue to work hard in practice.

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“We had a good practice [Wednesday] and it reflected in the way we played [Thursday] so I think they’re starting to understand the game and they’re starting to execute things better and it’s paying off,” said Aronson.

Medfield’s David Parsons led the Warriors with four goals and Connor Roddy added two in the five-goal victory. A stat Aronson was pleased with was not the scoring itself but how those chances developed.

“A stat I love to see is out of 10 goals, eight of them were assisted,” Aronson said. “Eighty percent assist rate is great, that means we are playing like a team.”

With only seven seniors on a roster of 25 players, the 2011 Warriors are a much younger team than in years past, leading to a natural adjustment period.

“Offense takes a little while to click anyway so more so with younger kids,” said Aronson. “They need to understand and do a lot of reading and seeing what the options are as they develop on the field like a quarterback seeing different reads. Making those split-second decisions. The options should be there.”

Despite fielding a younger team, the Warriors’ expectations remain the same.

“The expectation that we have is to not only make the tournament but to go as far as we can so if we have a few speed bumps along the way that’s fine, we can take a positive out of all of them and try to figure out what it is we need to work on,” said Aronson.

In order to give his Warriors more than enough opportunities to improve, Aronson has made sure his team is playing the elite teams in the state and around New England to gain the experience necessary to make a successful tournament run.

“We try to load up our vacation schedule with some tough iron with Billerica, Xaverian, Wellesley before vacation and then we have Glastonbury, Connecticut coming up on Saturday and then we will have Dover-Sherborn coming out of vacation and Longmeadow right after that, so we try to load it up pretty good,” Aronson said. “We try to test ourselves and it’s about getting better and playing better as we get to May and into June so we can prepare ourselves for the tournament.”

On Thursday, Medfield played as well as it has to this point of the season, but Aronson still pointed out areas of improvement.

“We made a couple of mistakes on defense and let them get some easy shots and we got beat one-on-one a couple of times but for the most part we played good, team defense,” he said.

The Warriors are back in action on Saturday when they host Glastonbury, Conn. At 2 p.m.


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