How To Get Better At Lacrosse By Yourself (11 Tips)
Struggling with lacrosse? We’ve all been there. Lacrosse is a sport that is rooted in the fundamentals, and mastering the essential skills of the game can make you a better lacrosse player in no time. Many times, the only way to improve in the offseason is to figure out ways to practice without partners or teammates. In this article, I break down several ways to improve as a lacrosse player by yourself and curate various resources available to players provided by professional and ex-professional lacrosse players.
How To Get Better At Lacrosse By Yourself Fast
1) Cradle With Both Hands
The absolute simplest way to improve at lacrosse is by simply cradling a stick in your hand with a ball. You can also get comfortable switching hands and cradling in your weak hand. Randomize how many times you cradle before switching hands. An old coach of mind would tell me to go home and cradle while watching TV. Build that muscle memory! You don’t want to have to think about cradling while you play.
2) Practice Ground Balls
The next simplest way to improve on your own is to learn to consistently pick up ground balls. Ground ball scrums in practices and games can be physical and require grit. Being able to consistently pick up ground balls is one of the best ways to stand out to coaches and teammates as a new player and it is easy to improve at this on your own!
Practicing this is as simple as cradling. Put the ball down and pick it back up over and over and over and over…. It sounds incredibly boring, but it works. Work on getting the butt-end of the stick close to the ground and scooping through the ball in one motion. Then, work on cradling after you pick it up. As it feels easier, you can increase the complexity. Go to a field and roll the ball ahead of you and pick it up on the run to simulate game-like situations.
3) Wall Ball Drills
Without a partner, learning how to catch and throw is easier than you might think! Since lacrosse balls are rubber, they bounce. You can throw the ball against a wall or backstop to get reps in without a partner. As you are starting, just throw the ball and catch it with your dominant hand until you can comfortably throw and catch 20-30 times without the ball touching the ground. Then, do the same with your weak hand. There are more advanced drills: switching hands between passes, quick sticks, behind-the-backs.
4) Shooting Reps
Improving at shooting is as simple as bringing balls to a field with a net and shooting as many shots as possible. At first, the key factor is to focus on getting the ball in the net as consistently as possible using the correct form: stepping toward the net, good overhand form, and good follow through. Then, move to different positions around the field. Of course, you want to work on your ability to shoot on the run from the major areas of the field: down the alley from the midfield, winning topside from the midfield, at the island (initiated from X mostly), and from the wings.
5) Shoot at Targets
Shooting targets are a great item to have if you do not have a friend willing to step in net and play goalie. Corner targets are nice but there are also other products which produce targets around a goalie such as the hips and between the legs. Being able to visualize how a goalie will cover a net when you are shooting and practice aiming for open areas will improve the quality of your shots.
6) Dodging
Dodging is an essential skill for an offensive player and typically how offenses initiate plays. You need great footwork to be an effective dodger. Practicing your dodges can also be combined with shooting on the run. Try out some dodging drills, along with some beginner drills to grasp the fundamentals of explosive dodging.
7) Get Fast Feet Like Mikey Sowers (Footwork Drills)
Ladder drills improve foot agility and hand-eye coordination (if you aren’t looking at your feet while doing them!). Ladder drills focus on either forward/backward movement or lateral movement and are great for improving footwork for both offense and defense. As you get more comfortable just doing the ladder circuit. You should be jogging up to the agility ladder, breaking down, and sprinting to a cone set up ten yards after the end of the ladder. Just doing the ladder drills is good for agility but adding the extra steps helps make you more comfortable making the transition from quick choppy steps (initiating a dodge) to a sprint (beating your man to the goal). Another way to increase the complexity of the drill is to carry a stick with a ball and keep cradling throughout the drill!
Cloverleaf Drill (see visual depiction here) is the perfect drill to condition your body for short bursts of speed, breaking down, and changing direction into another burst of speed.
8) Watch Lacrosse Highlights
The best way to improve as a lacrosse player on your own is to watch professional lacrosse games. Whether field or box, the PLL and NLL feature the best lacrosse players in the world! Not sure why your dodge isn’t working? Not sure where you should be looking on the field after a successful dodge? Where are you supposed to stand when you don’t have the ball? Find a player whose style of play you enjoy watching and see how they play the position. Maybe even cradle a lacrosse stick while you are watching! Follow LaxFarmer on TikTok for highlights and clips!
9) Receive Online Coaching from Pro Lacrosse Players
Just as watching film can be instructive for a lacrosse player looking to improve, so can remote instruction. Professional players Deemer Class and Matt Dunn (Whipsnakes Defenseman) have teamed up to create 1stclasslax which provides in-person and online programs. Online content includes workouts, film breakdowns, instructional videos, and more!
10) Stick Tricks!
Stick tricks are a fun way to mess around with your lacrosse stick that can help with your comfortability with and familiarity of your stick in addition to working on hand eye coordination. Professional players, particularly Paul Rabil, are frequently seen performing stick tricks. No one will say stick tricks alone improved their game, but it’s always another excuse to have fun with a lacrosse stick in your hand which will always help.
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11) Mini Lacrosse
Mini versions of the sport, like beach lacrosse or Casey Powell’s Speed lacrosse, require fewer people and simpler rulesets. Games like this lower the pressure on players and promote creativity. Have you been wanting to try a new dodge or want to try a behind-the-back feed without a coach evaluating your play on the sideline? This is a great way to try new things or practice new movements without the pressure of practice or needing 12 people and a goalie to do it!
Bonus Tips!
How To Get Better At Catching In Lacrosse
When doing wall ball drills, or passing with a partner, substitute the lacrosse ball for a tennis ball. The lighter weight of the tennis ball will allow it to bounce out of your head if you keep your hands still when trying to catch the ball. Using the tennis ball will force you to treat catching the ball as if you are in an egg toss or water balloon toss. You have to be gentle and cradle to consistently catch the tennis ball. This will also help you get in the habit of putting your stick in a position ready to pass, shoot, or cradle and carry after catching the ball.
How To Get Better At Lacrosse Defense
Footwork drills are king for a defensemen trying to improve their 1v1 defense on their own. Ladder/Agility drills and change of direction drills are king. Watching defensive highlights is also a key factor for improvement. Watch the PLL Whipsnakes play defense. Pay attention to how the on-ball defender adjusts and plays the ball carrier in different areas of the field and then how different players adjust off-ball depending on the ball’s location and offensive set. While you can’t work on your own communication with teammates by watching film, the PLL does a fantastic job mic’ing up defensive players and goalies to demonstrate their communication. Pay attention to players like Eddie Glazer and Tucker Durkin during their mic’d up clips.
Defense is all about communication.
So we mic’d up Eddy Glazener, the leader of the Redwoods defense.
🎙️Listen in @justglaze pic.twitter.com/KGbYzPbfHU
— Premier Lacrosse League (@PremierLacrosse) August 25, 2019
How To Get Better At Women’s Lacrosse
All of the tips in this article apply equally to men’s and women’s lacrosse. You can also seek out online coaching from players like Charlotte North and benefit from watching professional lacrosse with Athlete’s Unlimited!
How To Get Better At Faceoffs in Lacrosse
Similar to First Class, various professional faceoff athletes have developed The Faceoff Academy which also has in-person and online instruction. They produce drills, training, and equipment recommendations.
5 Tips to Become a Better Lacrosse Player by Coach Gafner – Crankshooter.
com
It’s easy to lose sight of the little things in lacrosse amid all the instruction, practicing, and games. But as Coach Gafner, lacrosse coach and author of www.CoalitionLax.com.com, points out, sometimes those little things go a long way in making a better player. Here are five things Gafner thinks players need to consider as they work to improve their lacrosse performance:
Attitude
As you enter this season you have to have the right attitude. You have to be willing to learn and ready to listen. If you have the right attitude, you will do a lot more of the small things without knowing it. I have one player on my team last year that had the best attitude. It took me over a year to realize that it was his attitude that was the reason for his improvement.
Work Ethic
If you are willing to put in the hard work, then the results will show. A part of your work ethic is practicing the right way. You need to be aware of the time you have to get better and use it well. I understand you have a lot going on with your life, but when you make time to practice or have practice, use that time to the fullest.
Last year at the start of my season the guys on my team wanted to goof around a lot. I didn’t mind it sometimes. But they didn’t want to goof around during a drill or a time when we had to be productive. Some of the biggest improvers on my team last year were players that had a great work ethic. So, adjust your work ethic to make the most of this season.
Ability to Understand the Game
A problem with a lot of new teams or teams that aren’t on the east coast or teams that aren’t successful is they just don’t understand the game that well. Everyone that plays lacrosse should always be learning about the game.
That goes for coaches too. To understand it, you have to learn why teams do things. For a lot of newer and unsuccessful teams, they don’t understand the right way to play the game because they don’t have the talent or personality to play lacrosse the right way. So, the first thing to do to understand the game is to ask questions to other coaches or players.
After that, watch a lot of lacrosse games to analyze what the teams are doing and why. And if you do understand the game pretty well, you need to help your teammates get a better grasp.
Communication
This is another area that you can always improve your game by being a better communicator. It is easy to think for yourself, but to play team defense takes a lot of work and communication. This communication develops on the practice field and translates to the game field the better you are at it.
I also think you need to work on your communication with your coaches too. If you don’t understand something they want you to get, talk to them about it when they have free time. They will help, because they are teaching you something for a reason–which is to improve your game and help the team win.
If you communicate with your teammates off the field, your team will get better faster. Keep the communication lines open so that your teammates know they can call on you for help, too.
Don’t Take Things Personal
Trust me–a good coach should tell you things that are going to make you mad. But, do not take it personally. As a coach I do want the players to like me–that’s how I get them to push it when practice is rough. But some players need to hear things about their game.
For example, I always tell players to scoop a ground ball with two hands. We had a couple of kids I will yell at about this. I hope they didn’t take it personally. I was just trying to make them and the team better. This is a good thing to know: you kids might think us coaches are out to get you but we aren’t. We just want to help.
Try to improve in these five areas and I know your lacrosse game will improve greatly. But, you have to bring the same passion to these five tips, if you want them to work.
Coach Gafner is the Director of www.CoalitionLax.com where he and his staff coach, mentor and develop young student aathletes.
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I like and have taken in all that I read. Very good. I am an assistant college club team coach at High Point U.
This is helpful.
Gus Schwewnk
Shumakov, wake up, you have a competitor! Petukhov scored the first lacrosse of the season
Ufa becomes the center of attraction for unusual goals. Naumenkov’s own goal, Petukhov’s lacrosse goal… What will happen next?
This KHL season, you and I seemed to have seen everything already: incredible comebacks, big scores, beautiful combinations from Torpedo Larionov, warm-up fights performed by Timkin and Hunt, Mikhail Naumenkov’s first own goal in the last six years . Forward “Barys” Egor Petukhov has not been distinguished by anything like this before. Moreover, before that, the 28-year-old striker was an ordinary player on the third or fourth line. In the same year, Andrei Skabelka sometimes puts him in the top 6. Before the start of the current season, he spent an average of 11 minutes on the ice with Barys. In this championship, the situation began to slowly change. Egor began to give more time, and for the first time in his Kakhael career he scored more than ten points in a season. Now he has 29matches in which the player has already scored nine goals, and also gave three assists. In general, “Ufa-Arena” has recently attracted unusual goals. In a recent match between Salavat Yulaev and Avangard, we saw an own goal by defender Mikhail Naumenkov. It is symbolic that he scored on November 11, because on this day, exactly six years ago, the player has already done a similar trick, playing in CSKA in a match with Yaroslavl Lokomotiv. It looks like Mikhail is better off declaring a day with four digits as black on his calendar. And now, two days later, we saw a masterpiece from Yegor Petukhov. This time, however, the goal was scored against someone else’s goal. And not with a hand, but with a stick. As mentioned above, no one had previously noticed Yegor’s talent for such beautiful pucks. On the contrary, Petukhov was known as a defensive forward. But who said that beauty must necessarily be inaccessible to roleplayers? After all, every person has a sense of beauty. And Petukhov showed it to us today. 43 seconds before the end of the second period, he received the puck behind someone else’s goal, put it on his hook and skillfully threw the projectile into the nine closest to him, thus opening the scoring in the game. Most of all, in this moment, I liked the reaction of Petukhov himself. First, he showed the referee several times with his hand that the puck was in the goal. And when the referee recorded a goal, Yegor did not go crazy with joy, but simply talked to his partners and shrugged. Say, well, I scored lacrosse and scored, well, what’s so and so? Every day these things happen! And commentators seem to be used to the fact that in Ufa some kind of anomalous goals have been constantly happening lately. No wild screams in a fit of emotion, but rather a harsh statement of the fact of scoring a beautiful goal. In the final seconds, Arkady Shestakov scored a much more conventional empty-net goal that gave Barys a 2-0 win and also ended Salavat Yulaev’s 13-match streak of points. But we will remember this game not for its result, but for Yegor Petukhov’s lacrosse goal. Egor, score so often! Sergei Shumakov, wake up. You have a competitor! |
The Broncos invited a lacrosse star to watch.
They see him as a receiver and a returner – First & Goal
Surprisingly, it wasn’t Belichick who invited.
- Denver Broncos
- Draft
- 2022 Draft
CBS Sports
Original news
Elena Shuvaeva
Text translation
You don’t have to play in Alabama or Georgia to become an NFL star. Davante Adams, for example, played for Fresno State, and Darius Leonard played for South Carolina State. Moreover, you can get into the NFL from other sports. Antonio Gates was a star basketball player for Kent State and played basketball for the Julius Peppers.
Does this mean we will soon see an NFL player who played college lacrosse with success? On Wednesday, the Denver Broncos were visited by an unusual college graduate.
Jared Bernhardt played lacrosse in Maryland. There he won the Tewaaraton Award for the best lacrosse player in the country. Bernhardt holds the Maryland records for career points (290), goals (202), single season points (99), single season goals (71), single NCAA tournament goals (18), and single NCAA tournament points. (24). As a freshman, he started in all 19 matches and helped the team win the national championship.
After that, Jared decided to play football and moved to Fresno State, where he won the competition as the starting quarterback.