Oconee schools’ lacrosse program add to state expansion

By Sydney Kohne

Twenty years ago, the sport of lacrosse for high school boys and girls was started at six schools in the Atlanta area. As of 2019, that number has jumped to 115 schools for boys and 112 for girls statewide. One recent addition is Oconee County High School, whose young program is becoming more than a statistic for one of the most rapidly growing sports in the nation.

Blake Mooney, head coach of Oconee’s varsity boys’ squad, has the highest hopes for the future of the young team. 

“It’s a program that’s really gonna take off,” said Mooney. 

Heading into the third official season for boys and the second for girls in the spring of 2020, OCHS is one of the latest public high schools in Georgia to adapt to the growing popularity of lacrosse in the southeastern United States. In a state dominated by football, lacrosse is making its mark as an impactful and fun sport for young athletes. OCHS saw the opportunity to offer an outlet for its students to fall in love with another sport and seized it. 

“It was just time,” said OCHS’s athletic director Kevin Yancey. “I think the district and community saw that the need was there to have another offering so we were happy to do so.”

Boys’ lacrosse came first for OCHS. With higher numbers of eager athletes signed up, OCHS fielded a junior varsity lacrosse team in the spring of 2018 for its inaugural season. One eager athlete was then eighth-grader Nick Knisley. While playing club lacrosse for Oconee Youth Lacrosse Association, he got to play with the high school’s JV team while still in middle school. 

“I was kind of excited because colleges, they like seeing that you’re actually on a varsity team instead of [just] a club team,” Knisely said.

Now a sophomore at OCHS, Knisley has seen the national spread of lacrosse through his father and grandfather’s experiences. After playing lacrosse during his youth in New York, Nick’s grandfather, Kurt Knisely, moved to Georgia in the 1960s when he started the Georgia Tech lacrosse team in 1974. 

The first recorded high school programs in America started in the northeast in the 1880’s, and the sport officially made its appearance in Georgia over 100 years later. While the north to south expansion process took over a century, once high school lacrosse was established in the state, its popularity boomed. Jay Watts served as the first lacrosse coordinator for the Georgia High School Association and the head coach of the first organized girls’ team at Westminster in Atlanta and has seen firsthand how the sport has gained the following it possesses in the state. 

“I’m not sure at the time we were getting started we thought about what it might look like in 10,  20 years,” he said. “We knew we had kids who were really interested and knew the sport was fun and had a great deal of potential to be a good fit for this area.”

In 1999, Centennial and Roswell High Schools were the first public schools to field boys’ lacrosse teams. That same year, the Georgia Girls’ Lacrosse League was born and six high schools in metro Atlanta fielded girls’ teams. By 2002, lacrosse was officially sanctioned as a boys’ and girls’ sport by the GHSA with 21 male and 15 female teams. 

“It didn’t really matter what school you went to, we were just happy to see the sport being played,” said Watts. “There was a community of coaches and lacrosse fans that were willing to spread the sport as much as possible.”

Fifteen years later, the Oconee County community decided it was time to have lacrosse programs of its own. While club teams had already been established in the area for the youth, lacrosse had not yet been offered as a school-sanctioned sport. In 2017, the wheels were set in motion to create high school teams for OCHS and its neighbor, North Oconee High School.

Faith Hoyt is currently the girls’ lacrosse coach at OCHS. Originally the girls’ basketball coach, she took the opportunity to try out a new sport when she heard the school was offering lacrosse and needed a leader. 

After being unable to ring in their inaugural season in 2018 due to lack of players, the girls’ program now has enough team members to head into their second season of JV play in the spring of 2020. Hoyt hopes that in three to four years, there will be enough players to eventually field both a varsity and JV team.

“It’s a fun sport, it’s cool to watch, it’s exciting,” Hoyt said. “I think [it will take off] once people catch on to the excitement and newness of it and people get over timidity of learning it.”

Tommy Whittle now stands in Watts’ shoes as lacrosse coordinator for the GHSA. In his third season of overseeing the sport in Georgia, he’s caught on to the tidal wave of popularity of lacrosse in the state.  

“It’s contagious. People see or hear from others how they enjoy it and want to get involved,” Whittle said. “We have almost 140 [teams] now, but in five years, we could have two thousand.”