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Kenya Prep
Two weeks out and everyday we are tuning up sticks and communicating with our colleagues in Kenya about trip planning. On May 6th, we will journey to Nairobi to drive 12 hours to reach the village of Butula to start the Busia Lacrosse Club
99 lacrosse sticks on the wall, take one down and pass it around, 98 lacrosse sticks on the wall. Here I am glued to my miniature yellow chair in the Kids Lacrosse The World warehouse cutting old, worn out frayed strings to replace with fresh whites from our pals at Jimalax. My fingers are dried out and cracked from the hours of replacing heads and tuning up the sticks. Our equipment drive in conjunction with our partner LacrosseUnlimited brought in tons of great, used equipment and now the goal is to clean up and tune the used sticks for our students in Kenya, Africa this May. We plan on bringing 30 boys sticks and 10 girls for a total of 40 lacrosse sticks to 200 students.
We've been cutting our teeth here literally the past few weeks pulling old knots apart, threading new nylons and criss-crossing shooters for clean looking sticks. I hope the students will be taking care of the sticks and can only hope when we teach our clinic on stringing and stick maintenance they remember, chances are I will make them demonstrate what they have learned (probably took me 5-10 sticks to really get the hang of stringing).
When we first went to Ranau, Malaysia I had gathered a ton of used balls from my friend Matt Bocklet, director of Doco Lacrosse and X10 Camps who generously donated 40 or so slimy, greasers that had been buried for months and stained by the dirt and grass. We are one upping our efforts to bring better quality and will be bringing along 100 brand new lacrosse balls from the good people at Sling It Lacrosse out in California! We can't wait to see how excited the kids are when they see all these fresh balls! The question is how many will they lose? My bet is they will only lose 10 in six months of playing lacrosse. Any other bets?!
As the lacrosse goals are nearing being completely constructed at the Butula Hekima Academy I set out to source two used lacrosse nets here in Denver and came across Greg Martinez of Thunder Ridge High School Lacrosse, one of our big supporters who were able to donate two nets that we will patch up and bring with us to string onto the wooden goals.
T-minus 2 weeks to grand adventure and lacrosse impact!