There aren’t too many opportunities where, right in Albemarle County, lacrosse players from Charlottesville and the surrounding areas can get hands-on instruction from professional players as accomplished as Kyle Harrison and Maxx Davis. But that’s exactly what’s happening out at Blue Ridge this week as Harrison and Davis, who now play professionally on the LXM Pro Tour, serve as the lead instructors at Blue Ridge School lacrosse camp.
“We’re focusing on instructional aspects like yesterday afternoon we did all stick work,” Davis said. “And then this morning we did timing room shooting and we’re going to evolve to shooting on the run and different forms of shooting so we’re trying to focus on technical and non-contact parts of the sport.”
Harrison and Davis spend some serious time at various spots around the country teaching at small clinics and camps, with an emphasis on getting a lot of reps and direct instruction from Harrison and Davis.
“For starters, if you have 150 kids, each kid will get five shots and nobody is getting better with that,” Harrison said. “Number two, we have to remember kids come to camp to interact with us and if you have 200 kids and two of us, we’re really not going to get much one-on-one interaction with each kid.”
Harrison, who was a Teewarrton Trophy (lacrosse’s Heisman) winner at Johns Hopkins and his cousin Davis, who was a standout at UMBC, are focused on giving back to a sport that’s given them an awful lot.
“We’re from Baltimore and we’re kids who certainly didn’t expect all of this,” Harrison said. “We didn’t expect to play professionally and live in (Los Angeles)…so we like to coach and we like to help the game grow. The game has done so much for us and this is what we do…we owe it to the game to do our part.”
Blue Ridge assistant John Hetzel reached out to Harrison and Davis about potentially hosting the camp, and it was a clear philosophical fit with what Harrison and Davis do around the United States.
The Barons’ camp is open to and includes a lot of players of different ages and developmental points, which is a unique challenge for Harrison and Davis who are handling the instruction. But as of day two, it was working out quite nicely for everyone involved.
“The camp they’re running is absolutely terrific,” said Blue Ridge head coach Kyle Gardner. “We talked with (Harrison and Davis) before the camp started about structuring it in a way to reach and help guys of different ages and they put together a really nice curriculum for the week.”
