Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 10/10/20 – from US Lacrosse
In partnership with NCSA, US Lacrosse is proud to highlight its newest Impact Athletes — boys’ and girls’ high school lacrosse players who are supporting their communities with special efforts.
We all recognize that these are unusual and unprecedented times, but great challenges also offer great opportunities, and US Lacrosse continues to receive and share some of these stories. Once per month through the end of 2020, US Lacrosse will recognize these athletes.
US Lacrosse has created an easy-to-use online submission form so you can share your stories and photos with us. US Lacrosse reviews all submissions and selects exemplary high school athletes to recognize. These are their stories.
Chloë Jones, Ursuline Academy, Del.
Jones, a 2022 from Ursuline Academy in Wilmington, DE, who recently announced her verbal commitment to Syracuse, has taken her own time to spread the game of lacrosse to those who might not otherwise find it.
She has started a training program for inner-city girls aged 6 to 14 and has drawn the attention of the lacrosse world on social media, receiving positive feedback from legends like Kyle Harrison and lacrosse personalities like Tari Kandemiri, aka Official Lax Girl.
The free clinics are run every Tuesday through the Green Beret Project. The players are supplied with masks, sticks and balls, and Jones teaches them the basic fundamentals of the sport.
“The goal is to increase the participation of minority girls in this great sport,” she told US Lacrosse’s Donovan Dennis.
She encourages other young women of color with an interest in lacrosse to “be the change.” She thinks the best way to increase representation is to pick up a stick early, stay with the sport and play.
Michael Whaley, Germantown Friends
Whaley has dreams of playing professional lacrosse, but he also aspires to coach and share his “love and appreciation for this game.” He plays and coaches youngsters with Warhorse LC in Philadelphia.
Whaley is a sophomore at Germantown Friends School who has a passion for giving back. He is an Educational Policy Fellow at The Greater Good Initiative, a youth-led, bipartisan policy think-tank that looks to create sustainable, research-driven bipartisan solutions to problems in education, civil rights, public health, environment and economy. Whaley is also the vice president at Encode Justice, a national organization that seeks to expose intersectionality between artificial intelligence and criminal justice.
With the cancellation of sports in the spring and the subsequent conversations surrounding racial injustice, Whaley has taken the time to speak with anyone who will listen about the issues faced by underrepresented communities.
“By opening up the sport to underrepresented communities, you don’t know what could happen,” he wrote. “Maybe the next Lyle Thompson is sitting in some village in Spain as opposed to a lacrosse hotspot like Maryland or New York.”
