Girls’ lacrosse is ready to take off at East Brunswick
By george albano
Staff Writer

The East Brunswick High School girls’ lacrosse program could be headed for a turning point.

The Lady Bears just completed their fifth season, finishing 6-9, but head coach Cindi Todoroff feels the program is at a crossroads and ready to take off.

"It’s still a relatively new program," the first-year head coach said. "The coaches who were here before did a tremendous job developing the skill level and the enthusiasm, but I really feel now is the time to take it to another level."

Todoroff, the girls’ field hockey coach at EBHS since 1981, is in her second year with the girls’ lacrosse program, serving as JV coach last year. But when Daniella Kolarsick, the 2002 head coach, moved out of the area, Todoroff stepped up as the program’s fourth head coach in its five years.

She, however, plans to stick around, and now she wants her team to follow suit and step up. The interest in girls’ lacrosse is certainly there, as over 60 girls tried out this year, with 38 making either the varsity or junior varsity teams.

"We had a very competitive tryout," Todoroff noted. "And it was a very interesting tryout because it was all inside because of the weather.

"But what a huge difference in the skill level of the girls," she added. "The first few years of the program the sport was so new that the coaches had to do a lot of teaching, basic things like how to catch and throw the ball. But the new girls who tried out this year were so much more skilled. They’ve been introduced to lacrosse through camps and clinics. They come in more experienced now."

The next thing Todoroff did was recruit Cheri Brooks as her assistant coach.

Brooks, who played four years of collegiate lacrosse at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, brings a wealth of knowledge to the East Brunswick program.

"She’s dynamite," Todoroff said. "She’s an elementary school teacher in the West Windsor district, where kids learn how to play lacrosse when they’re in fifth grade. I played lacrosse in college, but where I came in knowing the basics, Cheri came in with an advanced knowledge of the game and has passed that on to the girls. She brought in a lot more sophisticated defenses and attacks, and the program was ready or that. After four years of learning the game, the time was right."

In fact, Todoroff doesn’t even think of Brooks as an "assistant" coach.

"Even though I’m ‘the head coach,’ and she’s the assistant, I think of us as co-coaches," she said. "Any credit we get, Cheri has a lot to do with it. With her on board now, it’s a great opportunity for our kids, especially the younger kids, to further their skill development."

It showed, too, as the Bears seemed to get better as the season went on and played their best lacrosse at the end of the season.

While there is no GMC as of yet in girls’ lacrosse, the athletic directors of the four schools in the conference which offer the sport — East, South and North Brunswick, and Old Bridge — arranged for an end-of-the-season tournament among the four teams.

East Brunswick, the second seed, edged No. 3 South Brunswick 12-11 in the semifinals last Friday. Then in Monday night’s championship game, the Bears rallied from an early 3-0 deficit to knock off top-seeded Old Bridge in another 12-11 thriller. East Brunswick scored the game-winning goal with only 19 seconds left after Old Bridge had tied it with 38 seconds remaining.

"What a great game," Todoroff said. "The key to this team is, it’s very resilient. Every time they fell, they got right back up, not just in that game but all season. They got a little bit better every game.

"But the thing I like to point to is when we played teams with a similar background to ours, programs that have been around for about five years, we played right with them or even a little bit better, and that’s where we want to be at this point."

The Bears’ top player was senior attack Kaitlin Parke, a four-year varsity player who scored her 100th career goal in the semifinal win against South Brunswick. She added eight more goals against Old Bridge in the finals, including the dramatic game-winner, and finished with 113 career goals.

That number is even more amazing when you consider Parke played mostly defense her first two years on the squad.

Parke was one of nine seniors on the team. Two more on offense were Kristin Marcaly, a first home attack, and Samantha Chu, a left attack wing. The defense was also senior-oriented, with Alex Schmidt and Cherry Liu on the wings, Gina Blanar playing third man, Allie Minieri at cover point, Michelle Berson at the point, and Lauren Parnick in goal. Berson, Minieri and Liu were tri-captains.

"The great news is that even though nine seniors will be graduating, we had 15 freshmen on the team," Todoroff pointed out. "And those freshmen made up a majority of the JV team, which went 8-2 and beat a lot of the traditional powers in the sport. So that was a healthy sign for the future."

And the future is something Todoroff loves talking about.

"My vision for the future is to take the program to the next level and start playing the traditional powers tougher," she said. "I hope to run a camp this summer and have some clinics for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders, like I do in field hockey. Because we don’t have a feeder system for girls’ lacrosse, we’re two or three steps behind other towns, but that just means we have to work a little harder. It’s worked for me in field hockey so I’m hoping it works in girls lacrosse, too.

"We’re really in a hot bed where we are," she concluded. "Princeton just won the national championship. Trenton State had a great season, and Rutgers is really good every year, so there’s a lot of opportunities out there for girls. It’s such a great sport, too. It’s played with the finesse of field hockey, the passing of soccer and the strategy of basketball. And the great thing about a town like East Brunswick is you can get athletes from those sports altogether at the same time and have the potential to compete."