July 13, 2018 · 0 Comments
After first picking up a lacrosse stick just four years ago, athlete, Zoey Kruger, a Shelburne resident, has come a long way in her development in the sport. Fourteen year-old Zoey has earned a place on the U17 Girl’s Ontario Field Lacrosse team. That’s quite an accomplishment to make a team that has older players. She even made it past a U15 team she was eligible to try out for.
Zoey started in the sport after watching her brothers play and getting encouragement from her dad. She started out playing with the Orangeville Northmen.
“My Dad played professional lacrosse and my brothers played, so I grew up watching it a lot,” Zoey explained. “I started getting involved with it because I loved watching the game. It was a lot of fun to catch the ball with the stick. It was something different.”
She had already been in competitive sports playing hockey in Shelburne and with the Orangeville Tigers. Zoey has
also been a competitive gymnast train
ing with the Orangeville Twisters Gymnastics Club. After playing for a few years she started more intense training attending lacrosse camps to hone her skills on the field.
“I went to the camps with some older lacrosse players. I was told there was going to be a U17 Team Ontario this year and they were hosting tryouts. I wanted to go for the experience and tryout with the older girls. I really wasn’t expecting much. I went out for that and they invited me back for the next tryout. I thought that was really cool because I was the youngest one out there. I went back for the second tryout and there was a lot of new girls,” Zoey said.
She ended up making the team as the youngest person on the squad. While Zoey will be heading into grade nine in the fall, the rest of the girls on the team are in grade ten and eleven.
The Ontario Team will start with a light practice in July, then ramp it up before heading south for some pretty serious competition.
They will be in Rochester, NY, in November, then they will compete in Florida for the President’s Club.
Zoey is planning to take her career in lacrosse as far as she can.
She hopes to continue playing through high school and continue at the varsity level in university and eventually move on to the sport at the professional level.