Scuttlebutt has it that Nicole Garbin, the Oregon women’s soccer team’s prolific stiker, might extend her college athletic career after soccer season ends.
Garbin recently told me that Jen Larsen, the Ducks’ women’s lacrosse coach, half-jokingly suggested that she should go out for lacrosse in the spring.
Since she’s never played lacrosse in her life, Garbin found this pretty amusing.
Still, it’s an intriguing idea.
Sure she has no idea how to cradle a lacrosse stick or how to catch a ball in it. But Jordan Kent, Oregon’s other multi-sport athlete, had never played organized football until last year. Look where that got him: a career-high 113 yards in six receptions against Cal. Kent is now considering forgoing basketball and track this year to train for the NFL combine.
Garbin is as athletic as Kent, and with her speed, fancy footwork, and ability to run circles around defenders, she makes a difference. Her presence doesn’t guarantee the Ducks victory, but it increases their chances exponentially.
Since Garbin began her Oregon career in 2001, the Ducks are 34-32-3 with Garbin on the field, and 5-28-5 when she misses games.
She also holds 15 Oregon records, including the career points total record that she claimed in dominating fashion in Arizona last weekend. Garbin put in three goals in two games, and will wreak more havoc against the Huskies this weekend.
Think about all that, and translate it into lacrosse.
In some ways, lacrosse is similar to soccer. It has a field and two goals, and the aim is to put the ball in the goal. But of course you catch the ball instead of kicking it.
Garbin has played basketball and soccer, so she won’t have a problem understanding plays and getting a sense of her position on the field.
But she has to figure out how to use that pesky little stick with the shallow net on one end.
My own first time with a lacrosse stick is a pretty recent memory. From that experience, I’ll say that cradling a lacrosse stick is one of the most unnatural sports skills in the world.
“Cradling” in women’s lacrosse is the art of running full speed while keeping the ball in the shallow, straight-backed net by rotating the stick back and forth. In theory, the centripetal force that you’re creating will keep the ball in the net.
This doesn’t always work in practice. On my first few tries, the ball refused to stay in the pocket. And the cradling motion felt like some exotic tribal dance that involved excessive, ungainly arm movements.
Then of course, there’s catching.
To learn catching skills in lacrosse, players are told to visualize the ball as a raw egg. You need to ‘give’ – let the stick sag back – to absorb the motion of the egg.
Right. If I had an egg for every ball I dropped while trying to master the art of catching, chickens would be extinct today.
But since Garbin’s got way more natural athletic aptitude than I do, she’ll likely have an easier time picking up cradling and egg-catching.
So if Garbin plays in the spring, the lacrosse world had better look out. Because with Garbin in the backfield, opposing teams are going to have to reckon with a big, bad soccer player with jets for feet and a stick in her hands.
Plus she’ll probably be kinda grumpy about having to walk onto Papé Field in a skirt.
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