Lacrosse team scores big for AIDS project
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| In My Opinion |
Passionate though they are about lacrosse, some Kettle Moraine High School players could not have imagined that those webbed-headed sticks they use would help in the fight against AIDS.
But come July, the half dozen Waukesha County teens and two coaches are headed to South Africa, where they'll teach orphans the sport they love in an outreach program that provides AIDS prevention education in a country so desperately in need of it.
Even before they get on the airplane, though, these kids are winners.
Sure, they're pretty good at their game, a mere adolescent as school sports in Wisconsin go. The girls varsity team - a babe born as a junior-varsity team just three years ago - was undefeated going into this weekend. About a half dozen area schools have girls lacrosse teams.
But more to the point, they got into this project not for a trip abroad, but to raise money for the South African kids who need scholarships for lacrosse camp and high school in a country noted for having the largest number of HIV infections in the world.
While at a tournament in Illinois last year, teens who were playing on a Milwaukee Select lacrosse team encountered a coach who had participated in the South African Lacrosse Project the previous summer.
The project was founded in 2007 by two Baltimore-area brothers, Kip and Harrison Hart, who planned a visit to a former au pair. She'd gone on to work at a nonprofit organization trying to improve the lives of people affected by AIDS and HIV in South Africa. They wanted to help with what they knew best - lacrosse. The two, who were in middle and high school at the time, raised money for equipment and then coached the first weeklong lacrosse camp there, north of Johannesburg.
In years since, other volunteers have joined them both in raising funds to send kids to camp, contributing equipment, or coaching. Lacrosse is used to teach the kinds of things that team sports can do - cooperation, discipline, hard work, a sense of accomplishment.
The weeklong day camp also incorporates a nutritious meal each day, education about prevention, and care and support for at-risk kids who've already lost so much to AIDS.
It didn't take much for the girls to jump in with both feet. They decided to raise money by selling key chains - mementos of lacrosse made by South African women - and T-shirts at tournaments, lacrosse clinics and games.
"The whole point of raising the money was to get the kids going to camp," said Amy Gelhaar of Dousman, a junior on the girls varsity team. "They have to be good kids, get good grades, to go to camp."
So far the crew has raised about $1,700 - money that will be used to pay orphans' $50 camp fee and will provide $100 scholarships for high school, said Colleen Brueske, mother of two of the teens who are part of the project crew. Nick Brueske is a sophomore at Kettle Moraine and Katie Brueske is a freshman. Both have been playing lacrosse since they were little, having lived on the East Coast where lacrosse is much more established than in the Midwest.
The players - Gelhaar; the Brueske siblings of Wales; Quinn Sousa, a sophomore from Wales; Allie Behrend, a junior from Delafield; and Kristen Layo, a junior from Wales - also are organizing a school dance at Kettle Moraine on June 3. The group members, who will get cheaper airfare by traveling on a mission flight, are paying their own way, so all the money they raise will go to the lacrosse project kids.
Colleen Brueske said she's also collecting lacrosse equipment to send along. (You can reach her for donations at brueske_5@hotmail.com.)
Margaret Layo, one of the Kettle Moraine girls varsity coaches, and Sidney Jones, a former professional lacrosse player and now head lacrosse coach at St. John's Northwestern Military Academy, will be going, too.
Layo, who's never played lacrosse but agreed to co-coach it when 25 girls, including her daughter, showed up for a first season in December 2008, said she's excited to accompany the girls.
"They're all very self-motivated, caring, community-oriented girls," she said. "And they're passionate about this sport that they play year round."
Most of the girls attend clinics and play in the Milwaukee Select program when not in the high school season. In the last couple of years they also volunteered to run a youth clinic at Kettle Moraine in the summer to introduce the sport to younger kids as a feeder program for the sport at high schools.
That experience has given them confidence that they'll do the job as camp coaches in South Africa, where the camp participants will be ages 7 to 20, several of the girls said. In all, about 20 volunteer coaches from around the U.S. will participate.
I watched the girls at an after-school practice this week for my first primer on lacrosse.
The only equipment the girls need is their stick (crosse), goggles and a mouth guard. Boys play a little rougher, so they have padding and helmets.
Kristen Layo said it's a fast-paced, relatively high-scoring game where players catch a baseball-type ball in the webbed cup of their stick - or pick it up off the ground - and then run with it and pass it until a player tosses it into a 6-foot-square net protected by a goalie.
"We love lacrosse, and we love to spread it," she said. So teaching anyone the sport is just plain fun.
But the prospect of traveling to South Africa to teach it, and experience a totally foreign culture for a cause much bigger than themselves?
"Unreal," she said. "Out of this world."
Call Laurel Walker at (262) 650-3183 or email lwalker@journalsentinel.com
