Portage Unites 'Frenemies' Into Lacrosse Force
By
Pam Shebest
Special for MHSAA.com
May 11, 2021
PORTAGE — On the basketball court, Brooke Hoag and Grace Cheatham were “frenemies.”
But now that spring sports are here, that has changed.
The two seniors from rival schools are teammates.
Hoag, from Northern, and Cheatham, from Central, are both members of the Portage girls lacrosse team, a co-op composed of players from both schools.
When playing against each other, “you have to be focused on your team,” Hoag said. “When you come to lacrosse, it’s almost like you flip a switch because they’re your team now.
“Playing against them is just fun. You look at them and you know how they play in different sports, so it’s fun because you can kind of pick on them. It’s also a competition, and you definitely learn how to separate the two sports.”
After being shut down last year because of COVID-19 restrictions, the lacrosse team is having one of its best seasons ever.
Portage is 12-2 so far and currently ranked No. 8 in Division I, according to LaxNumbers.com
“For our returners, I think (the year off) has given them more motivation to want to play,” said Kate Twichell, in her seventh year as head coach. “There’s a fire lit, especially under my seniors.
“They’re playing so hard. They understand every opportunity is another opportunity they weren’t going to get.”
This season is different from any other, with mandated masks and rapid testing. Adapting to cool weather and then hot makes masking up a little more challenging, Hoag said, but worth it to have a chance to play. Twichell said Portage schools provide a mask that is easier to wear. “None of them will claim they love it,” she added. “The second we say they can take them off, they will 100 percent take them off.”
But in spite of the drawbacks, “This year, our varsity team is playing together the best I think it’s ever played together,” Twichell said. “The team chemistry is just phenomenal.
“That’s really all them. They’ve really taken extra time to make sure that they are putting in the work to come together.”
For the first time, Portage is hosting an MHSAA Division 1 Regional, facing Zeeland East on May 20. Finals are June 12 at Novi High School.
Other Northern varsity players are seniors Mairin Boshoven and Karly Turchan, junior Annie Galin and freshman Avery Kelly.
Central players include seniors Kyla Meyle, Jenna Camp, Calista Richmond and Lauren DeHaan; juniors Ryan Knauer, Olivia Jensenius and Lauren King; and sophomores Sam Swafford and Lexie Springman. Casey Hendrixson coaches the junior varsity team.
Learning Fast
Neither Hoag nor Cheatham grew up playing lacrosse, but that is not a problem, Twichell said.
“My varsity players are all returning, so I have six returning starters on varsity right now,” she said. “My JV team, of the 15 of them, 10 are new to the sport this year.
“They’ve never touched a stick before. MHSAA gave us some small practices so we had a few in earlier, but most of them are brand new within the last 12 months.”
Learning that the stick is actually an extension of their hand is one of the hardest adjustments for new players, she said.
“I always tell the kids the first week is going to be the hardest – the frustration of dropping the ball and not being able to figure out the mechanics of it is always going to be the most difficult,” she said.
Hoag first played the sport when she was in eighth grade and took to it immediately.
“The only downside is the bruises you can get from it, but I like to say they’re like trophies showing you’re an aggressive player and it’s just something that you almost want to show that you play,” the midfielder said.
She kept in shape during the shutdown by working out at home.
“I have a net and a rebounder in my backyard, so I would practice shooting and my stick skills by myself,” she said.
Losing last season was especially difficult for the midfielder.
Not only is the junior season a big year for college recruitment but “my sister (Ashleigh) was a senior and I got my last chance to play with her taken away.”
Cheatham also has played lacrosse for five years, with her interest piqued by her father and brother.
Family helped her hone her skills during the shutdown.
“I live super close to Portage Central High School, so me and my brother (Andrew, a freshman who plays lacrosse at Central) used to go and play a lot of wall ball against The Stable. We did a lot of shooting drills on our own, just to keep busy.”
Both Hoag and Cheatham also played on summer and fall travel teams, which helped keep them in shape.
One unexpected moment for the two happened May 1 at the Matt Thrasher Memorial Games when each received a $500 scholarship, awarded each year to two players from the girls team and a player from each school’s boys team.
Thrasher played lacrosse and, while a freshman at Northern, died in a boating accident in 2004.
Cheatham echoed Hoag in saying it was an honor to receive the award.
“The fact that his family still does this is really amazing,” she said.
Hoag is headed to Trine University and will play lacrosse there, while Cheatham will attend Kent State in the nursing program and hopes to continue to play the sport, possibly at the club level.
Ultimate goal
While the ultimate goal is to one day have enough players to field a girls team at each school, the co-op team is under the umbrella of Portage Northern.
That poses one of the few problems for Twichell, who teaches Spanish at Hackett Catholic Prep.
“For me, honestly, the biggest thing is recruiting, getting into both schools equally to get enough kids to field a team,” she said. “Trying to get in the schools as one person from outside the school is pretty difficult.
“Likewise, especially during the offseason, getting enough practice time at both facilities so that each player gets their home facility or their home games or home practices, that can be a challenge.”
Next year that could be a bit easier. Twichell’s husband, Kurt, was recently named Northern’s head football coach after longtime coach Pete Schermerhorn retired. The past seven years, he was on the Portage Central football staff.
One future recruit for the girls team should be a shoo-in. The couple’s 2½-year-old twins – daughter Aubrey and son Griffin – already have lacrosse sticks.
Pam Shebest served as a sportswriter at the Kalamazoo Gazette from 1985-2009 after 11 years part-time with the Gazette while teaching French and English at White Pigeon High School. She can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Calhoun, Kalamazoo and Van Buren counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Portage’s Brooke Hoag fires a shot against Grand Rapids Northview this spring. (2) From left: Portage coach Kate Twichell, Grace Cheatham and Brooke Hoag. (3) Grace Cheatham (45) advances the ball against Ann Arbor Skyline. (4) Twichell and daughter Aubrey enjoy a moment with lacrosse stick in hand. (Action photos by Chris Boot. Head shots by Pam Shebest. Twichell photo courtesy of the Twichell family.)
Carman-Ainsworth Grad Shaver Pioneering Programs in 2 College Sports
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
August 8, 2023
Alyssa Shaver has made a habit of getting women’s lacrosse programs off the ground.
Her first year in the sport was the first year of the program at Flint Carman-Ainsworth. Her collegiate career involved playing in the inaugural seasons for both University of Detroit Mercy and Lawrence Tech University.
As a coach, she led the first team at Urbana University in Ohio.
When she left Urbana for Lincoln Memorial University, a Division II program in Tennessee, she had an opportunity to take over an established – albeit still relatively new – program.
Two years in, another chance to start a program arose, and she once again stepped up.
However, this was not a different school – but in a different sport.
The 2008 Carman-Ainsworth graduate recently finished her third year in charge of the LMU women’s lacrosse program, and is now preparing for Year 2 in charge of the women’s field hockey program at the school – coaching a sport she had never played and rarely seen.
“I had not watched ‘Ted Lasso’ but when people figured out what I was doing, they told me about it,” Shaver said. “Last fall I started watching it and I was like, ‘Oh God, this is my life right now.’”
Starting with a new sport was how Shaver’s athletic career got jump-started in the first place.
She was a volleyball, basketball and softball player prior to high school, but when her basketball coach brought up the idea of starting a lacrosse program at Carman-Ainsworth, she decided to give it a try. The connection was almost immediate.
“I didn’t know what (lacrosse) was,” she said. “But I put a stick in my hand, and it felt like the most natural thing. I was a point guard in basketball, and I had played basketball since I could walk. I think in lacrosse, the footwork, defense, concepts and ideas are similar to basketball. But when I picked up a stick, it was like, ‘I get to carry this ball around? I don’t have to dribble it?’ From there, it kind of clicked.”
Shaver was a remarkable scorer at Carman-Ainsworth, racking up 226 goals during her four-year career. That included 81 goals her senior season.
While at Carman-Ainsworth, she also continued playing basketball and volleyball.
“As a point guard in basketball, I didn’t really care about scoring,” she said. “In lacrosse, I was really good at offense and scoring. I was a setter in volleyball, so my other sports I was always setting other people up.”
Her success at Carman-Ainsworth and at the club level led to an opportunity to play for U-D Mercy’s new program, led by coach Mary Ann Meltzer. Shaver was an academic all-conference selection during her time there and played for two years before coming back home.
While she was no longer playing, she continued to coach, something she had started while a freshman at Mercy.
It was while coaching a club team that the opportunity to return to playing at Lawrence Tech presented itself.
“It was terrifying,” Shaver said of returning to the game after two years away. “I would play in summer league, and I always had a stick in my hand because I was coaching, but I hadn’t really played competitively. I was 23 and most of my teammates were 18-year-old freshmen. I always joke with them now – some of them are my best friends – but the first couple years, they didn’t want to talk with me and I thought they didn’t like me. It turns out, they were scared of me.”
Shaver played three seasons at Lawrence Tech, earning All-America honorable mention from the National Women’s Lacrosse League in 2014 and first-team NWLL All-America honors in 2015 and 2016. She also was named an All-American by the NAIA as a senior.
Prior to her third season, with Lawrence Tech in need of a coach, Shaver reached out to Meltzer, who had recently retired from U-D Mercy. The two were reunited at LTU, and Shaver and her teammates reaped the benefits, reaching the NWLL championship game, which they lost 9-8 in overtime. Shaver was the NWLL National Offensive Player of the Year.
In 2017, with Shaver on the coaching staff, Lawrence Tech advanced to the NAIA national title game.
“She’s pretty much responsible for a lot of our program at Lawrence Tech,” Meltzer said. “She was the driving force in recruiting kids. She had taken a couple years off, and I think when she came here she was that responsible and was kind of the go-getter in getting players and getting people interested in LTU for quite a while. Fortunately, we’ve done well.”
In 2018, Shaver took over at Lourdes (Ohio), leading the program to its first winning season in her first year.
After two years at Lourdes, she took over Urbana, building the program from scratch. She took over the LMU program prior to the 2021 season. The Lady Railsplitters were 2-5 her first season, but have gone 12-7 and 10-9 in the two seasons since.
Shaver taking over the field hockey program alongside her lacrosse duties wasn’t the original plan. But after things fell through with the coach originally hired for the job, and with some of her lacrosse players signed on to play both as well, the LMU administration turned to her.
“I have a lot of experience with new programs with lacrosse, and the girls were so great and super appreciative,” she said. “My lacrosse players have some experience, and a lot of the field hockey girls were just awesome and understanding, and helping me learn.”
Shaver is learning the game and was able to get some help from volunteer assistant Khotsofalo Pheko, a former runner at LMU who played field hockey in South Africa before coming to Tennessee.
Meltzer has faith in her former player to navigate all of it and find success, even if she told Shaver she was crazy for taking on the field hockey job initially.
“Obviously she has the work ethic, and she’s going to do what she needs to do to be successful,” Meltzer said. “As coaches, especially younger coaches, when things aren’t going well they think that more is better when sometimes less is better. I think she just needs to be patient; we all do. That’s the biggest thing. With her, starting so many programs – we’re all competitive, we all want to be successful really quick – it is going to take time.
“She’s an incredible person. She has a heart of gold.”
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PHOTOS (Top) At left, Alyssa Shaver takes the field for Flint Carman-Ainsworth, and at right she coaches at Lincoln Memorial University. (Middle) Shaver just finished her third season leading LMU women's lacrosse. (Below) Shaver (bottom row, fifth from left) was a four-year player at Carman-Ainsworth, including on this 2007 team. (Photos courtesy of Alyssa Shaver and Lincoln Memorial's athletic department.)