Last spring, Spencer Yu was unsure if he’d have enough players to put together a Women’s Lacrosse Team at Lick. This year, with 37 women on the roster, Yu, the head coach of the Women’s Lacrosse Team, has nothing to worry about.

The unprecedented growth of the women’s lacrosse program is largely due to the shift of women’s soccer from the spring to the fall. Suddenly finding themselves without a spring sport, a number of soccer players found themselves drawn to lacrosse because of the similarities between the two sports. Senior Sydni Green, a first time lacrosse player, told the Paper Tiger, “The only thing different is the lacrosse stick and all the specific rules. Otherwise it is kind of a combination of basketball and soccer.”

The team’s growth can also be attributed to an unheard of number of freshman women trying out for the team – 14 of the team’s 37 players are freshmen. Some players, such as Pilar McDonald ’19, had played lacrosse before. The Lick team has seen an increasing number of freshmen with prior lacrosse experience joining the team, largely as a result of more girls picking up the sport in middle school. According to US Lacrosse, California has some of the fastest growth in the number of lacrosse players in the state from 2001 to 2013. In 2014 alone, the number of youth players grew by nearly 425,000.

Still, a number of freshmen joined the team with no prior lacrosse experience. The team’s positive reputation inspired many freshmen to try a new sport. When asked why she chose to join lacrosse,Sara Kashani ’19 said, “I had heard such great things about the sport, and wanted to try it out for myself and see what it had to offer.” McDonald echoed Kashani’s sentiment, telling the Paper Tiger that she had noticed that “girls’ Lax was the best team at Lick so it was hard to resist.”