You have to love a sport where one of the positions is “attack.” Not “attacker,” but “attack.” But how did a petite, small-town Kaua‘i girl find her way onto a lacrosse team in the Pacific Northwest at a small, private
You have to love a sport where one of the positions is “attack.”
Not “attacker,” but “attack.”
But how did a petite, small-town Kaua‘i girl find her way onto a lacrosse team in the Pacific Northwest at a small, private school?
We’ll let Shanlyn Souza answer that question herself.
Growing up playing soccer, the daughter of Sandra and Stuart Souza of ‘Oma‘o went away to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Ore., home of the Boxers, and gave up sports, temporarily, in order to fully “embrace college life,” she said.
That lasted about one school year.
After her freshman year, the exercise-science major found herself missing the competition that sports provides, and at the prodding of her roommate decided to check out lacrosse, she recalled.
There had been attempts at educating young and not-so-young Kauaians about lacrosse here, but nothing going on on Kaua‘i at the present.
She found lacrosse a lot like soccer, “fast-paced,” with other elements she found very much to her liking, she said in a telephone interview.
“I just grew to really love the game. I really bonded with a lot of the players,” said Souza, who was elected the squad’s captain for three years in a row.
“The leadership there translated into success in the classroom,” said Souza, who will graduate next month and carries a 3.1 grade point average.
Souza, 22 and a 2004 graduate of Kaua‘i High School, joined the school’s lacrosse club as a sophomore walk-on, and stayed with the program when it moved into a Division III sport in her junior year.
Now a senior, the 5-foot, 2-inch Souza is tied for second on the team in assists with six, fifth on the team in points with 13, and has started nine of the 10 Boxers’ games this year.
Her last home game of the season was Friday. The Boxers end their season, and Souza her collegiate lacrosse career, with two road matches next week.
Souza has the distinction of scoring the first goal ever in Pacific history, the lone goal in a 22-1 loss at the hands of the University of Puget Sound in the 2007 season that marked the Boxers’ first official game as a college team.
The independent Boxers play against teams from California, Missouri, Colorado, Texas, Washington and Oregon. She spent spring break in Colorado, playing four games there.
Explaining lacrosse, Souza said it is 11 a side, though no more than seven people on one team can be at one time in either the attacking or defending zone, or an offsides penalty is called.
So, in essence, there is a lot of seven-on-seven play, she explained. On the Pacific sports Website, goboxers.com, she is listed as a senior attack.
The Boxers, she said, have been improving every year.
In her junior year, last year, she started 12 of 13 matches, finished tied for fourth on the team with five assists, and had two, three-point games (two goals and an assist) in two matches.
In her sophomore year, 2007, she played in all 13 games, finished fourth on the team with five goals, and led the Boxers with four assists.
When conducting the telephone interview, Souza said she had just been accepted into graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, where she will pursue her master’s degree in athletic training.
She also plans to keep playing lacrosse, hoping to make a traveling club out of Manoa (UH does not have a lacrosse team). She also plans to share an apartment with friends at UH and others she knows on O‘ahu, she added.
“Four years flew by,” Souza said of her undergraduate time at Pacific. The school’s annual lu‘au is Saturday.
“I loved being up there, but miss Hawai‘i,” she said, adding that she is looking forward to coming back to Hawai‘i. “Yeah, work on my tan.”
Besides soccer, Souza participated in paddling and cross country while at Kaua‘i High.
Paul C. Curtis, sports writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 237) or pcurtis@kauaipubco.com
