DALTON, Ga. — Last year was a landmark one for the ever-growing sport of lacrosse in northwest Georgia when Dalton High School debuted its boys high school lacrosse team. With boys teams now at all levels, Mike Sanderson, who coaches several of the programs in Dalton, put it succinctly when talking about what’s next.

“It’s the girls’ turn,” he said. 

As long as the weather allows, their turn comes tonight when the Dalton Lady Catamounts lacrosse team is scheduled to play its inaugural game at Chattanooga Girls Preparatory School at 7 p.m.

It’s a venture that the girls on the team are proud to be a part of. 

“I think it’s pretty cool, we get to be the first girls lacrosse team,” junior Emily Rockholt said. “I hope we can live up to some kind of standard.”

“We’re definitely setting the bar for future girls lacrosse players in Dalton,” added sophomore Sadie Cowan. “I think it’s really important we’re the first because we get to show people it’s a really fun sport for everyone to play.”

Sanderson said a year after the boys high school team was formed, the timing was right to get the girls program started.

“The last five years we’ve really focused on the boys,” he said. “Now we’re in the elementary, middle school and high school level. We needed to get the girls started because the girls sport is growing just as fast as the boys are. … Because of the growth of the sport and personally my passion for lacrosse, it was time to get it going.”

Getting the girls high school team started came with more challenges than starting the boys program. While there was already a base for the boys at the youth levels, it wasn’t the same with the girls.

“There was nothing,” Sanderson said. “This is the first girls program in Dalton, Ga., we were able to get started.”

Lacrosse is one of the fastest growing sports in the country. It involves players carrying and passing a small rubber ball in netted sticks and shooting at a goal. Boys lacrosse allows a great deal of physical contact, but it’s not allowed in the girls game. 

The first step toward getting the program off the ground was finding a coach. Colleen McGoldrick, a teacher in the Dalton school system, has an extensive background playing and coaching the sport. She helped out this past summer with a clinic at Dalton, and Sanderson approached her about coaching the new team. 

“I’m excited about it. It kind of just fell into place,” McGoldrick said. “I teach fourth grade over at Park Creek. This gives me a whole ‘nother group of girls I’m able to work with. So I’m excited to push the sport and grow the sport.”

Her experiences in the sport are very similar to the challenges she’s facing in starting Dalton’s program, both in terms of coaching a new team, and turning raw athletes into lacrosse players.

“I started playing lacrosse when I was in high school,” said McGoldrick, who grew up outside of Boston in a rich lacrosse territory. “I never played before. The coach came up to me and said ‘You can run, have you ever played lacrosse?’ I ended up playing four years of varsity. That’s kind of my philosophy to: if you can run, you can play lacrosse. I’m really excited to bring it here. I coached up in Chattanooga for a couple years, started the girls program at Signal Mountain (High School). It’s taken off well so I’m hoping it will do the same thing here.”

With McGoldrick on board, the next step was to recruit the players that would make up the first Dalton girls lacrosse team. Both McGoldrick and Sanderson said the response was phenomenal.

“I’m very impressed with the amount of girls that wanted to come out,” McGoldrick said. “We had 40 sign up initially, 29 are here every day and part of the team. Their commitment is huge. We have girls who dance. They’ve got two days a week they have a dance conflict. They come, they run, work out for 30 minutes then go to dance. 

“Twenty-nine girls is great. It allows us to do a lot of full-field action. We have seniors down to an eighth-grader. We are a club team. The high school is really backing us, giving us a lot of support. We’ll be an official high school sport next year. It’s great we’ve got that built up already. We have four or five seniors and a lot of underclassmen that are really going to build the program.” 

A big part of the recruiting effort came from one player that already had a background in the game. 

“I met a young lady named Olivia Richardson who said basically to me, if I could build the program, she can get the players,” Sanderson said. “I agreed to that and she made it happen.”

“I started playing in seventh grade in Atlanta before I moved,” Richardson, a junior at Dalton, said. “I played in high school before I transfered to Dalton my freshman year. I played with Baylor over the summer with Scenic City (summer club program). I just like playing, so I kept bothering Mr. Sanderson about it.

“I texted and Snapchatted people a lot. I kept it saying ‘You should do it. It’s pretty fun. You get to hit people if you don’t get caught. Everybody just wanted to try something new.”

For some girls, joining the new program was able to keep with a family tradition. 

“My brother was part of the boys first lacrosse team. Why not be part of the first girls team?” said Rockholt. 

“My brother plays for the rec league, elementary school league,” added Cowan. “Watching him and my dad both enjoy playing the sport and learning the sport, I became interested just watching their games. When I found out there was going to be a team, I was extremely interested in playing.”

Despite having very few athletes with knowledge of the sport, McGoldrick said she was pleasantly surprised with their skill level. 

“I was impressed from the start,” she said. “I was thinking we were going to have to do a lot of very basic dumbed-down things for just passing and catching and learning how to let go, give with the ball. They picked it up really, really quickly, which was impressive. The first week I completely changed my practice plan because I was thinking we’d just be working on passing for the first week. We got into dodging and starting to run drills. It’s worked well. The girls are very athletic and that’s helped out a lot. They’ve fallen into it.”

Richardson was also impressed with how quickly her new teammates picked up the sport. 

“I was surprised the first day when people were able to follow along with what she was saying and were able to catch the ball,” she said. “I remember my first day playing, I wasn’t able to catch and I wasn’t able to pick up a ground ball to save my life. Everyone here is just really athletic. They’re really fast so we have that as an advantage. They’re putting in a lot of effort and it shows.” 

Cowan said the athletic backgrounds her and the other players do have helped them make the transition to lacrosse.

“Of course the first day was pretty hard because none of us even knew how to hold the stick,” she said. “But pretty much all of us play another sport or do something else athletic so we already have a good base. I feel lacrosse combines a lot sports, so if you played a sport before it’s easy to pick up.” 

As the veteran on the team, Richardson said she’s doing what she can to help the lesser-experienced players on the team.

“I’m just trying to help them when I can,” Richardson said. “I don’t think I’m a leader in a sense. If they need a few pointers, I’ll be like ‘Maybe try giving with the ball more to catch it, or try throwing it this way, or try this to do a better cut.’”

“It’s different to hear things from a fellow player than from a coach,” Cowan said. “Sometimes it’s easier to understand. If there’s something one of the coaches are trying to explain, she can help us getting a better understanding of it so we can better understand the game.” 

McGoldrick said the team’s schedule offers a mixed bag of opponents. Being a team still in club status, Dalton is playing most of its games against Tennessee schools. Opponents like GPS and Baylor, which are well-established programs, will be a stiff challenge. But there are also games against other beginning programs that she feels her team will be very competitive in. 

The players understand the success of this year’s team won’t be measured in standard ways.

“It won’t be measured in wins and loses just because it’s our first year and for everyone else it’s their fourth or fifth or maybe even 15th year,” Rockholt said. “I think we’re measuring it more in how much we improve.”

Starting a new program is a special task. McGoldrick admitted that her players may not be aware of exactly what they’re doing, but she believes over time the magnitude of what they are doing will set in.

“I don’t think they understand what it means yet,” she said. “This is such a popular sport, it’s so fast-growing throughout the nation, I think they’re going to come back when they’re old Dalton alums and really see what they started. They’ll be excited to come back. It’s a big deal. I don’t think they’ll understand the full capacity of what they’re doing until they start coming back and seeing brothers and sisters and cousins and everybody again. I think it’s going to be really special for them. They don’t realize how hard a job they have to be that first team out there. But they’re going to be able to do it.”