Last season, the Gordon College Fighting Scots Men’s Lacrosse team struggled all season. Going 1 and 11, the team fought hard all season, though it ended, unfortunately. They secured their sole win against Thomas College last March in South Carolina. Although some teams may look back upon their bad season and worry about the future, new Head Coach Zachary Scarano says, “We’re not looking back.”
Coach Scarano, or Coach Scar as he likes to be called, was recently hired into the Gordon College Athletics community. He comes in with a focus on rebuilding and with a desire to work towards the team’s three pillars: brotherhood, discipleship, and excellence.
Their brotherhood piece involves the idea of “do the guys love and care for each other,” in the sense of Proverbs, “where iron sharpens iron.” In his rebuilding, Coach Scar hopes that his players will show genuine care towards each other.
The team’s second pillar is discipleship. The coaches “intentionally know the guys and believe in them and love them with God’s heart the best [the coaches] know how.” Coach Scar emphasized for this team that it could mean “telling [the boys] to get back on the line when they don’t think they can run anymore, but [the coaches] know that they can.”
The team’s third pillar for the upcoming season is excellence. The team has a variety of measurable goals in their practices to demonstrate their excellence. In practice, they have “a run test, stick work, and lifting numbers, and sprint tests,” and these are their measurable pieces of excellence, and giving full effort in everything they do.
Currently, the team is following NCAA guidelines, which only allow a certain number of fall practices. When the team has practice days, they “do a 6-8 am practice and then a 5 to 6 pm team lift, with a little bit of team time afterward.” With a smaller team this year, containing eight seniors, four juniors, four sophomores, and three freshmen, the ratio of players to coaches is a lot smaller. That allows “the guys to get a lot of individualized attention, and a lot of reps” in every drill they do in practice. Through their excellence and hard work, Coach Scar has said that the guys are already looking better on the field and performing better in drills than they were a week ago.
A lot of teams’ goals for the season revolve heavily around their record or their wins and losses for the season, but not this team. Coach Scar says wins and losses are “not the only aim.”
Currently, the team’s goal derives from the question of, “Can these guys learn who God is and his heart for them, through the brotherhood, through discipleship, and through what it looks like to walk with God in a pursuit of excellence?” Coach Scar wants his team to be able to thrive, not solely on the field, but in all aspects of life. Coach Scar is a big believer that his goal for the team is a big part of the life that God has given every person to live.
“It’s a lot of x’s and o’s in lacrosse, that’s probably 90% of what we do, but within that they can see God’s love, and if they can do it, they get to learn who God is,” Coach Scar explains. For this upcoming season, and the preseason that comes before, the team’s goal is focused so much on learning to love the Lord and each other.
Coach Scarano emphasized that the coaches love the guys no matter what: “Everybody’s in a different part of that journey, so it’s not one size fits all, and that’s ok, we love the guys no matter where they’re at, that’s not the condition, the condition is you on this team.” If you are on this team, then you will be loved with all of God’s heart; that’s one thing that makes this team unique from other lacrosse teams. So, although the team’s goal is intangible, it’s an important process that Coach Scarano hopes the team will follow through on.
All that being said, Coach Scar doesn’t really know where the season is going to take his team. He says he knows God is up to something but isn’t sure “if we’ll see it blossom spectacularly early on.”
The team has a verse that is going to be a focus for them for the season. This year’s verse fits the idea of new beginnings for the team. The verse is Zechariah 4:10, which says, “Do not despise the small beginnings for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin.”
Coach says there is an understanding among the team that they “don’t know exactly how the wins, losses will go, it could go great, it could not, but [they’re] trusting that God has brought [them all] here for a really cool process.” The team is trusting God in every step and doesn’t know whether God’s process will end in wins and losses, but they are excited to see God’s plan play out.
The team is moving towards hopefully a better season than they had last year. Coach Scar emphasized how the team is going to act as Paul did in Philippians. They will be “straining towards what lies ahead and not looking left or right and certainly not looking behind us,” as Coach Scarano explained.
Putting the past in the past, the team hopes for a better season filled with loving each other and the Lord, and we cannot wait to see the plan the Lord has for this team.
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