Athletics Spotlight: LCS Lacrosse Team Competing in Second Varsity Season
As Lakeland Christian continues to grow and evolve, the larger variety of interests each student has. Over the past few years more and more students have shown interest in the sport lacrosse, many students even play lacrosse for club teams around the city and state. LCS started a lacrosse team last year and completed their first season in the spring of 2018. Many people don’t know much about the lacrosse program, so we wanted to give everyone the chance to meet the men in charge. We sat down with both the head and assistant coaches to learn a little bit more about each of them.
Head Coach: Brian Davis
Brian is originally from Maryland and now lives in Lakeland with his wife Stacy, who is a substitute teacher at LCS. They have been married for 23 years and have two children, Miranda and Mitchell.
Brian works at CognITek Group and has been playing lacrosse for over 30 years. He has coached youth, high school, and college programs all over the country including Maryland, California, and now Florida. His favorite part of coaching is being on the field with the boys and the competition involved in the sport. Brian believes that the biggest strength of the team is their youth. There are so many young players that continue to become better lacrosse players every day and the biggest opportunity to improve is getting younger LCS students playing the sport in the middle school or even grade school level. With all of this potential, Brian hopes to be competing for State titles in the next 5 years.
When asked what he looks for in players, Brian said “Drive, discipline, and attitude. The rest is easy to teach.” He also expressed that he felt the team had great crowd support at games for the first official year.
Assistant Coach: Chris Murphy
Chris grew up in Camillus, New York, with his parents and two brothers. He is very close with his parents, who split their time between living in New York and Fort Meyers, FL. He has been playing lacrosse since he was 4 years old and came to Florida to play lacrosse at Florida Southern College. The summer after he graduated college, he had the opportunity to play lacrosse for the German national team. Now, Chris works at Fleetwing Corporation in Lakeland.
Head coach Brian Davis was a volunteer coach at Florida Southern while Chris was a player there, and when Chris came down to Florida to work, Brian asked him to help coach at LCS. He says the most rewarding part of coaching is when he watches his players struggle through something, but then overcome those challenges and work hard on the field. When talking about the future of this program at LCS, Chris said instead of having kids start playing in 9th or 10th grade, he wants kids to start playing in middle school or even younger so they can develop skills earlier and be able to play at a high level of competition in high school.
We are so excited to see what is in store for the LCS lacrosse program in the future. For more information on the lacrosse team and their upcoming season, visit http://bit.ly/LCSLacrosse