3V3 Motion Recovery and More!!!! Coach Mahoney, St. Lawrence

Following this, my first podcast with Coach Mike Mahoney at St. Lawrence I was extremely intrigued by this lacrosse drill and cannot wait to put it in my practice plan.

First, are these issues you work hard to emphasize? Do you ever struggle as a Coach with this?

1. We run a Motion and work hard to keep our middies consistently rotating in their triangles…
2. We often slide from the crease and need help keeping our middies focused and communicating as they slide covering a team with a disciplined Motion Offense.

Funny after all these years I have never seen anything like this lacrosse drill from St. Lawrence. I love it!!! Please read through the entire drill and then check out the diagrams below.

This lacrosse drill is exclusively for Middies on offense and your D Mids/LSM on Defense focusing on the unique movement and slides (communication) defensively.

There are three offensive middies in this drill. We begin in our base offensive configuration of two middies up top, and a middie in the crease or ‘high’ crease. Defensively, each is covered by a middie playing defense, your D Mids, and/or LSM. With me so far?

But also in the lacrosse drill is a “Stationary” attackman at X, or what Coach Mahoney refers to as the “transfer “ player. Each groups stays in the drill for three reps.

We pass the ball to begin the drill to one of the offensive middies up top, and we play. This middie:

1. Drives and tries to get inside for a shot
2. Drives and perhaps gets a shot from the outside
3. Drives then passes back to a middie filling his space
4. Or drives deep and then passes the ball to X who then redirects the offense with a pass to the weak side. In this case the player at X is stationary and only there to move the ball quickly to the other side, he does not go to the cage.

And we play, with the offensive middies continually moving.

But the real beauty of this drill is that there is also a strong emphasis on defensive slides from the middies as well, also focusing on strong verbal defensive communication.

As the topside offensive middie drives, we slide to him from the defensive middie in the crease. The top backside defensive middie then immediately drops into the crease. And the original middie playing defense on the original middie driving now also recovers inside and then to the third offensive middie, perhaps now the “fill” middie.

The purpose of the lacrosse drill is to emphasize the continuous motion offensively, and to reinforce the middie slides defensively. Thus we might want to have the defensive players slide aggressively on every move, just to teach where they should be, and to give them a lot of defensive slides reps.

Coach Mahoney explains all this this better than I do… for all Free Members, just click here to listen to Coach Mahoney in his own words,

Love to get your comments below! Or email me, mike@laxcoachmike.com.

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