Lacrosse kicks off pre-season

The Sisters boys lacrosse team had plans to head to Boise after school on Thursday, March 15, and participate in the Tablerock Tournament over the weekend, but plans changed quickly. At 2:30 p.m. on Thursday Coach Bill Rexford received a call that the tournament had been cancelled due to rain.

The news didn't deter the coaches and team. Everyone piled into vans and headed east, hopeful they would find some schools en route that would play them. Rexford told The Nugget it couldn't have worked out better if he had planned it.

Thursday night the crew camped at Crystal Crane Hot Springs outside of Burns and on Friday when they woke up Rexford had a full plate of lacrosse for both the JV and the varsity teams.

The varsity squad matched up against Meridian High School on Friday and walked away with a convincing 18-6 victory. Scoring was spread evenly amongst the team, with Scott Nelson leading the offensive onslaught with four goals. Beau Fitzke scored two goals and recorded six assists, and Gabe Reitmann, Drew Corrigan and Zach Valoppi each chipped in their first goals of the season.

On Saturday, the Outlaws lost 3-2 to Boise's best, Eagle High School, in a nailbiter that went down to the final seconds.

According to Rexford, the game was fierce and both teams played at full throttle.

Brennan Layne was stellar in the box and kept the Eagles to a 1-0 lead at the half.

The Outlaws went ahead in the second half with goals by Cris Smoot and Seabastian Boehm. With less than two minutes left in the game, the Outlaws were up 2-1. Eagle High was able to tie it up 2-2 and then with time running out put in the winning goal.

"Although disappointed, the Outlaws played extremely well," stated Rexford. "It was a contest like that we drove seven hours to have. We had to play well, which we did, and what was great about this non-league tightly contested game was that it showed us what we need to work on to raise our game to the next level."

On Sunday, the Outlaws crushed Skyview 12-3. Boehm led the way with five goals.

Earlier in the week, on Monday, March 12, the Outlaws fell 7-4 to Wilsonville. Last year Wilsonville won their division and were a pre-season top-10 team, and the Outlaws wanted to match up against a tough team to start their season.

Sisters went toe-to-toe with them for three-and-a-half quarters but weren't able to stay with them down the stretch. At the start of the fourth quarter, Sisters was only down by one at 5-4 but ended up losing the

contest 7-4.

"We have raised our expectations from being competitive with these kinds of teams to expecting to win," said Rexford. "We were appropriately disappointed when we came out on the short end of it. For us to play at this level after just two weeks of practice is great news."