Stickwork. Stickwork. Stickwork. Basic stick skills and ball control are the most important components of lacrosse. No matter how many different schools you are interested in, lacrosse is played the same everywhere and all coaches will look for players who demonstrate excellent stick skills. Therefore it is crucial to practice as frequently as possible and always work hard to improve your fundamentals.

Martin Ward, head coach of Florida Southern College (FSC) reinforced this importance when discussing what he looks for in players on the recruiting trail. Ward has led FSC for four seasons, just closing out an incredibly successful 2014 season with a final record of 11-4.

Ward is an accomplished coach, having been awarded co-Deep South Conference Coach of The Year in 2011, and vastly improving the men’s lacrosse program at FSC over his tenure.

What advice do you have for players interested in playing D2 lacrosse?

Figuring out where some of the coaches are going to be event-wise, expressing enough interest in the coaches program. When personally messaging the coach, we get those blanket emails and sometimes its dear coach, this and that, this and that, it’s just a blanket email to 150 coaches. Put something personal into the email about the school. Do a little bit of research and find a school that fits your size school, and find the athletic program that fits your skill zone as well, it will definitely help. Get in front of the coaches.

What is the best way for players to get on your recruiting radar?

Express strong interest in and knowledge of our program. That’s the best way to get on our radar. We seem to have a lot of success with guys that express interest in us not only our team as a lacrosse team, but also as an academic institution as well. Guys that want to be in Florida, they want to go to a smaller school, not a huge party school. Just a more low-key type, laid back atmosphere. We want the guys that want to be here, so we like the guys that are clearly expressing interest in Florida Southern. We will follow up with the homework and phone calls to find out if they would be a good fit for us.

What areas of player development would you recommend players to focus on?

Stickwork. Stickwork. Stickwork. 100%. Work on shooting, practicing ground balls. If you don’t have a good stick we’re not going to call you, it’s just the way it is. Athletes only get you so far. You need to have guys that can control the tempo of the game with their stick, that’s what the name of the game is. Stickwork is the biggest thing for us. When we’re talking to young high school kids and middle school kids, they need to be working the stick everyday. We prefer multi-sport athletes; playing a different sport in high school will help you in lacrosse.

What type of player do you look for–raw athlete or refined lacrosse player?

It depends on the position. For refined lacrosse players, a lot of times you find those guys on the attack or midfield positions, and they are skilled positions. Faceoff is definitely a refined position nowadays. Back in the day you could throw a football player in there and have him scruff for the ground ball, now it’s more technical. But defensively we could have a little more of a raw athlete. In the goal they could be a little bit more raw, more athletic, someone who is explosive to the ball. So offensive players more refined and then defensively we could have a little bit more of a raw athlete.

What is special about being a student-athlete at FSC?

Something that is special about being in our department as a student-athlete is the tradition of championships. We’ve won seven national championships at the Division II level, that’s not including individual championships for certain sports, that’s all team championships. There’s just a rich tradition of winning at Florida Southern.

How has the accelerated recruiting landscape impacted your approach to recruiting?

I think it has helped us 100%. Now we don’t have to worry about putting in a VHS or DVD, you can just click on the link and it’s all there. You can pull up files on your email and search easily. You can click on names in a recruiting software database and lookup all the information that you need on all the kids. Acceleration in terms of recruiting earlier and things of that nature, it has definitely helped us too because there are so many late bloomers looking for a home. They might have gotten overlooked because of the club team they played on or because of their size, and now they are coming into their own, and we’re definitely reaping the benefits in DII of a lot of these late bloomers that are looking for quality education and a great place to play. So it’s definitely helped DII, and it has helped us as a scholarship program to help get some of these better guys.

What are your do’s and don’ts, likes and dislikes of recruiting videos? If you have any.

We’re not looking for an interview on the video. So when there is a 2 ½ minute speech about who they are and what they do, that’s not really what I’m looking for. I’d rather have four minutes of good solid highlights where I can definitely tell who the player is. Don’t send a video of you playing against the worst team in the league where you scored ten goals. I would much rather watch a nice clip of you with a couple good possessions against a good team. Maybe you make some bad shots, maybe score a couple. It’s better than you just scoring 15 goals on a poor guy that just picked up a stick in the locker room before he went outside. You have to really look at what you want a coach to see.

Some final thoughts from Coach Martin Ward:

Division II lacrosse is growing so quickly across the country, not only for Florida Southern but for all the schools across the country that are playing D2 lacrosse now. when I played Division II ball there were maybe 20-30 teams in the early 2000’s, and now there a ton of programs playing DII lacrosse. So I think it’s a great option for students; guys who want to get out of the cold and come down south and play their heart out. You can actually feel your shaft when you’re playing lacrosse in January in Florida, that definitely helps. There’s a lot of great options out there, so kids need to just do their homework and understand that Division II lacrosse is getting very good. It’s quality lacrosse and they need to really be open to the opportunity.

ConnectLAX is a third party recruiting service and not affiliated with or endorsed by Florida Southern College or Martin Ward.