Omaha Eagles Lacrosse has been taking the field and paving the way for women’s lacrosse in Nebraska.
The club program began in 2018 when Coach Charlie Dinnel found a need for a women’s lacrosse team when his daughter, an eighth grader at the time, was planning to attend Central, and her only option to play lacrosse at the high school level was at Westside High School. Being a Central graduate himself, Dinnel said, “We definitely didn’t want her to have to play and wear red and black.”
Creating a team was not easy. “I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was overly confident,“ Dinnel said. But he conquered these challenges and came to Central to talk to the administration and began the club. The next obstacle he encountered is that not many people know what lacrosse is, and getting the word out to those who have never heard of it can be difficult.
Eagles Lacrosse is for all Omaha Public Schools girls from eighth grade to 12th grade. The organization plays in the Midwest Girls Lacrosse league, which is the championship of Iowa and Nebraska essentially.
In 2019, following the first spring season, the team needed to continue to work on skills and needed extra reps. Dinnel created “fallball,” the fall season, to counter this challenge. The set up is slightly different, instead of the normal 12 on 12, in the fall season competitions? Practices? are 7 on 7.
“The fall is mostly for developing and recruiting,” he said.
Dinnel looks to continuing to grow the lacrosse team and to get better every year. Looking to the future, he plans to create a middle school team within the organization so that “recruiting girls could start earlier in fifth, sixth, or seventh grade as opposed to eighth or ninth,” Dinnel said.
Lacrosse is not a sanctioned sport in Nebraska, but there was a push last year for it to become sanctioned. Dinnel said if lacrosse was sanctioned, there would be more exposure to the sport and the sport would grow faster. To sanction lacrosse all five districts in Nebraska would have to implement the sport, and they may not have the money and/or resources to do so.
