It takes skills to rock this cradle

You'll rarely meet a basketball player who can't dribble; likewise you won't meet a successful lacrosse player who hasn't figured out stickhandling.

The next time you see a youngster throwing a rubber ball off a brick building and into his crosse, don't think he or she doesn't have any friends — they're simply working on their stickhandling.

“The first thing I tell all our players that are brand new is if you can't catch and throw on the run, you can't even play the game of lacrosse,” Naperville North coach Kevin Banages said. “They'll need to get that figured out before we move onto more drills, and then into the Xs and Os.”

The fundamentals of stickhandling will take time, but passing the ball to one's teammates is vital to a team's success. The game features constant movement, and like basketball, a balanced team is going to have players on the move both with and without the ball.

Players will also hold the ball in the stick's pocket, twirling it while they figure out their next move. This stickhandling technique is regarded as cradling.

“People who are new don't understand how they cradle and how they can run with it,” Montini coach Pat Larmon said. “They see it happening but don't understand how.”

Because of the speed of the game and the likelihood that all passes are not going to be clean ones, the ball will often end up out of bounds. As in soccer and basketball, when a player throws an errant pass out of the bounds, the opposing team is awarded the ball. But, and this is where a lot of newbies get confused, when a player attempts a shot that goes beyond the goal, whichever team has the player who ends up closest to the spot where the ball crossed in going out of bounds, gets possession. This is why you will often see several players sprint toward the end line when an errant shot is attempted.

“One of the things that seems to confuse a lot of people is that when the ball goes out on the sideline you get possession, but not necessarily when it's a shot,” Wheaton North coach Chris Weed said. “Then it's the team that's closest to the ball, so a team can maintain or gain possession, and a lot of time that's why you really are backing up your shot.”

With players sprinting back and forth similar to soccer players, the athletes undoubtedly fatigue. And like soccer, the game rarely stops. But player substitutions in lacrosse are more like in hockey — you'll see them happening often.

“People often have a hard time figuring out how so many different players can run on and off the field,” Waubonsie Valley/Metea Valley coach Michael Julius said. “The game has become even more specialized over the years, so you see even more of it and a lot of people are surprised with all the substitutions.”