Louisa Dorsch was in seventh grade when she started playing lacrosse at a small private school in Maryland. Now 23, and the sole senior on the Oregon women’s lacrosse team, Dorsch has come
further than she ever dreamed possible.
When Oregon decided to add women’s lacrosse to its arsenal of Division I intercollegiate sports, Dorsch was in her senior year as the starting goalkeeper for Oregon’s Club women’s lacrosse team. She was also one of the coordinators who planned practices and managed the team.
When Dorsch and her fellow coordinators heard that coaches had already been hired for the burgeoning Division I team, they decided to tap into the new resource.
“At first, we just went to them to ask for help with drills. In the end, they started coming out and helping us run practice twice a week,” Dorsch said.
Oregon head coach Jen Larsen got to know Dorsch, and she liked what she saw in the
senior goalkeeper.
“I saw Louisa as a really hard worker. I knew she had a lot of passion and care for the Club program,” Larsen said. “I saw potential in her as a member of our program, and I knew she would be honored to be a part of this.”
That winter, Larsen approached Dorsch and expressed interest in having her play
for the Division I team that she was trying to put together.
“It was completely unexpected,” said Dorsch, whose tone was infused with a sense of excitement as she recalled the encounter. “But I
didn’t take it lightly because I loved playing and wanted to make sure that I could really commit myself and play for an entire year.”
Playing Division I lacrosse proved to be too tempting a deal to pass up. Dorsch delayed her graduation plans, stayed in school as a fifth-year senior and signed on as a member of the
pioneering class of the women’s lacrosse team.
“It was one of those opportunities that I knew wasn’t going to come around again. Even if I had other things to do and wanted to graduate, I could do those later on,” she said.
Her elevation to the Division I level was a virtual fairy-tale ending to Dorsch’s illustrious lacrosse career.
Dorsch has been completely devoted to the sport since she started dabbling with girls’ lacrosse in seventh grade. By high school, Dorsch was forced to switch to men’s lacrosse to continue playing because her school in Maryland did not have a women’s team.
“I started out in attack … and I was horrible,” she said. “But then when the team’s goalie went away for a weekend and they needed someone to volunteer, I figured I couldn’t get any worse than I already was, so I ended up playing goalie.”
Since then, she has owned the
position on every team she’s played for.
“It came much more naturally to me than playing attack did,” Dorsch said. “And I turned out to be pretty good at it.”
After high school, Dorsch moved across the country to attend college at Oregon. In Eugene, she joined
the women’s Club team, which
at that point was, at best, a work
in progress.
“When I started as a freshman, there were only four of us on the team who’d ever played lacrosse before,” Dorsch said. “We had very poor stick skills, we didn’t understand the game very well and pretty much just lost every game.”
Nevertheless, fast-forward four years, and the Club team had become a powerhouse in the Northwest. The team finished last season in first place and ended up representing the Northwest in the women’s lacrosse national championships in St. Louis.
As the starting goalie, Dorsch played an integral part in the Club’s success in 2004. “It was a really rewarding experience for all of us to get to represent the Northwest at nationals together, especially in our senior year,” she said. “There was a group of five to six of us who’d been playing together for a long time. We worked together for three years and saw each other improve. And it paid off.”
This year, Dorsch battled two other goalkeepers for the starting job on the Division I team and won. She recorded almost 700 minutes between the pipes for Oregon this season. Her work ethic and field presence impressed both her coaches and her teammates, and the senior geology major rapidly developed into a
first-rate collegiate-level goalkeeper.
“Louisa was just relentless,” said Larsen, “She wanted to improve every day. She came in and did extra work all the time — caught extra shots, watched extra film. In the last third of her season, she was just on fire a lot of the time in the goal cage.
“I think it was just a matter of her recognizing that this is sort of the end, and she wanted to go out with a bang,”
Freshman midfielder Jen
May agreed.
“Louisa just holds the defense together,” May said. “She’s so energetic on the field because she’s a senior. She goes all out for every game because for her, there is no tomorrow.”
For Dorsch, this past season has been her tomorrow, and the senior has had a difficult time letting go.
“If I could relive any one year of all the years that I’ve been playing lacrosse, I’d take another year in
D-I,” she said. “It was hard to have the season come to an end and
to realize that I don’t get to play in college anymore.
“That was the big thing towards the end of the season; it’s hard to be done when I don’t feel like I really finished. I know I could learn a lot more if I had three more years. I could become a better player, and I could learn more about the game so that I could become a better coach.”
Even though the Division I dream is over, Dorsch is determined to keep lacrosse in her life.
“I’m going to work at the lacrosse camp here this summer, and I’d also like to coach high school lacrosse,” she said. “Good coaching is important and has a huge impact on all levels of the game in the local community.
“I feel like I got a lot from the community here, and I want to put something back in it.”