Westerly boys and girls lacrosse have become contenders and it's not hard to see why

When he started the Westerly Area Youth Lacrosse program in 2011, Adam Kaufman wasn’t thinking about winning Rhode Island Interscholastic League titles. He just wanted to give his son a chance to play closer to home.

The championships followed anyway.

Westerly is a small community, but its passion for high school sports is unrivaled in Rhode Island. It is and always will be a football town, but lacrosse — boys and girls — has been growing of late and might have moved into the No. 2 spot.

It didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t start with Kaufman, but he, along with other volunteers who were at the ground floor of WAYL, created something that has inadvertently turned Westerly High School’s boys and girls lacrosse from teams into something more special.

“I was passionate about it … and was going to do what I could within reason to make it possible,” Kaufman said of creating the league. “With the encouragement of other families, we opened in Westerly — but we never expected it to be the feeder program to a high school team that would one day be successful.”

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While Westerly has a long way to go before it’s in the conversation with perennial state Division I powerhouses, the successes of last year’s boys and girls teams were hard to ignore.

The girls, with a team built predominantly of underclassmen, went 10-3 in Division III despite being the second-smallest public school in the division. The Bulldogs fell short of the finals, but not by much as they lost a 12-11 thriller in the semifinals to eventual D-III champ Bay View.

For the boys, the season couldn’t have been more perfect. Westerly went 14-0, cruised in the semifinals and pulled out a thrilling 9-8 win over Smithfield to win the D-III title, the program’s third in its 11-year history.

These two teams had more in common than being from the same school. The majority of the seniors and juniors on these teams were players who started playing on Day 1 of WAYL, giving Westerly a pipeline that isn’t going to dry up any time soon.

“The community has been fantastic,” said Kaufman, who still serves as WAYL’s president. “We have a lot of support from the families and businesses, with 10 significant business sponsors in town.

“It’s accepted now.”

The truth it, it was accepted from the start while simultaneously providing a blueprint that any community can follow if it wants to build a winner at the high school level.

Kaufman’s son, Isaac, had given up on baseball and Kaufman, a lacrosse player himself, had him playing in South Kingstown, the closest local program he could find. Kaufman spent time talking to Terry Hiltz, WAYL’s current vice president who also volunteers as an assistant for the boys high school team, and Beth and John Eckel talked about trying to put together a program in Westerly.

They figured out what it would take, had the idea approved by the Westerly Recreation Commission. Then the magic happened.

“We said, 'We think we can do this. Can you find some field space for us?’ and we were only expecting maybe 40-50 kids whom we could show how to pass and catch,” Kaufman said. “We opened registration and had 140 kids registered.

“Since then, it’s become a much bigger sport.”

“There’s two things that made it work, one being our proximity to Stonington and them already having had a program for 10 years,” Hiltz said. “A lot of people in Westerly are friends with people in Stonington, so they knew the sport but didn’t play it.

“Secondly, and I love all sports and how passionate everyone is about them, but my own kids tried baseball and there was a period of time where a lot of kids were in it, but kids weren’t interested in standing around.

“With lacrosse, there’s so many touches and everyone has a job … and everyone feels they can do something to contribute without constantly waiting for their turn.”

WAYL made the sport affordable, provided equipment for its younger players and kept registration costs low. Kaufman estimates they had 190 kids participating before COVID and those numbers have rebounded to the point where, because of field limitations, they’re almost at maximum capacity.

These players aren’t chasing youth championships. The focus is and has always been the fundamentals and getting them to gain confidence and enjoy playing the game. For Kaufman and everyone involved in keeping the league going, it’s a labor of love.

“I was just passionate about it and my son wanted to play, so I was going to do what I could within reason to make it possible,” Kaufman said. “With the encouragement of other families, we opened in Westerly, never expecting it was going to be the feeder program to a high school team that would one day be successful.”

But that’s exactly what happened.

For years, Division III and IV were much different scenes than Division II and almost a different sport than what was being played on Division I. Lower-division rosters were filled with athletes who learned lacrosse but weren’t necessarily lacrosse players.

At the high school level, that meant a lot of teaching has to go on, and in a short season, it’s tough to get going and build when you’re still going over basics on Day 1.

“We were just recruiting anybody that had a pulse,” Hiltz said about the early days of the boys team. “And it really wasn’t good for the kids who already knew how to play.”

Westerly still has athletes looking to try the sport for the first time, but the large majority of the rosters are now built on kids who started in WAYL and are ready to go the second they put a Bulldogs uniform on.

“It’s easy to plug them in,” said David Amato, a longtime assistant for the girls team who’s taking over as head coach this year and was also a WAYL parent. “You’ll lose four or five or six seniors every year, but you can plug in your freshmen right away and they’ll just continue to grow.”

“The old days, you could go from starting in ninth grade to being an All-American. We had some of those folks coming out of my high school,” Westerly boys lacrosse coach Steven Shaus said. “Having the WAYL program in Westerly is huge. We have 9-10 players last year that have gone through the program and this year, most have gone through.

“If we get 9-10 players a year at a school this size, that’s pretty good.”

Westerly is still a small school, so neither the boys nor the girls are turning away athletes willing to finally give lacrosse a try. But with the majority of their players experienced, it allows coaches to get into X's and O's while refining skills as opposed to building an entire team for scratch. That’s led to a better product and, in turn, has led to wins.

Both of Westerly’s teams are in Division III, but with recent success are in line to move up to Division II with the next realignment. While that’s been a problem in the past — the boys are 15-36 in their time in D-II vs. 50-25 in D-III; the girls are 25-38 in D-II, 58-36 in D-III — it seems the structure is in place to build teams that can consistently compete for titles once they take that next step.

“The mindset of the program is we’ll have potential,” Amato said. “We just need to continue to tap into that potential and see how far it can take us. We go into every year trying to make the playoffs and let the chips fall where they may, because when you get into the tournament, anything can happen.”

“We’d like to follow Pilgrim’s example,” said Shaus of the Patriots, who lost a D-III final, won it the following year, then moved up and made the D-II title game last spring. “If we finish middle to top of the pack, we should go to Division II and if we have a roster of 30-35 kids and last year’s freshmen will be juniors, that’s a good class.

“This year’s freshmen, that’s a good class too and we’re planning on doing something with it.”

But beyond the wins and losses, WAYL has left an impression on the kids who are playing at the high school level.

Hiltz has tried to get high school boys come out to coach, but it hasn’t always been easy. This year, Hiltz has some Bulldogs coaching a U-8 team who aren’t just going through the motions. They’re helping the kids learn the game and fall in love with it the same way they did when they were younger.

“My heart just wells when I say that because I’ve coached the boys and now watching them create these relationships,” Hiltz said. “They’re so invested in creating these relationships.

“Word has spread about how great these kids are and it’s such an incredible thing to watch because these boys are giving a boost to the next generation.”

Kaufman started the program. The Westerly community supported it. It grew and now it’s reproducing.

And this is how you build a championship program at the high school level, even if that wasn’t how it started.

“Adam had a vision,” Damato said. “And he made it come to fruition and it’s amazing.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Westerly Area Youth Lacrosse helped high school teams build winning programs