Fall Ball Preparation: A New Way to Lacrosse Excellence

Fall ball is just around the corner. This is frightening on many levels: (1) We're not even done with our 2013 team decompressions yet, and that means that dissonance is lurking (and not the good kind of dissonance where you jam the enemy's radar and shove a missile down their chimney when they're not paying attention); (2) The summer is over and I never got around to spending a day dropping water balloons from the top of my building to the street below, brightening a stranger's day with a refreshing cool down and heart-felt neck injuries; and (3) The painful offseason is approaching its most dastardly part -- the late-autumn nothingness that precedes the spring preseason.

Despite all of this, fall ball's appearance does mark the onset of something magical: The wonders of strength and conditioning. This is arguably my favorite part of the calendar year, watching teams dead lift Volkswagens and push elephants through glass doors just because those things need to be done. This is what makes the offseason bearable -- ridiculousness -- and Marist has potentially changed the paradigm for offseason workouts to prepare for fall ball:

Which, obviously:

More importantly, though, this raises all kind of conditioning possibilities. Timbersports may have been an untapped resource for fall ball preparation, and I'm surprised that nobody identified this before. I mean:

• Both lacrosse and timbersports require that the individual swing at things for some kind of benefit. They both result in beneficial gain -- the latter in saleable timber, the former in saleable athletic labor to which the labor receives no financial compensation.
• With all the Canadians involved in lumberjacking and college lacrosse, this may be the impetus to combine genetically-driven abilities and create superhuman Canadian lumberjack-lacrosseletes. Could you imagine Brandon Benn's finishing ability if he spent his entire fall splitting wood? Hell, he wouldn't even need to pick corners, instead putting the ball in the back of the net by actually throwing the ball through the torso of an opposing keeper. This is so apparent that I have a feeling that the Canadian government has already locked on to this and are weaponizing lumberjack-lacrosseletes as we speak. This is obviously their contribution to NATO.
• Short-stick midfielders would like learn a lot about cross- and poke-checking while single-bucking logs.
• Underhand chop = low-to-high lasers. No doink.
• Standing block chop = slash your way to confidence, caused turnovers, and victories! (Maybe.)

It's all there, man, and Marist is way ahead of the curve.