Lakeland Lacrosse Association hosting skills camp with two NLL stars

Lakeland also set to host 2021 Provincials.

Lakeland Lacrosse Association is hosting a kids skill camp with two of the top professionals in the world.

Former National Lacrosse League MVP Dane Dobbie and two-time 100 point Curtis Dickson are coming to Cold Lake from Dec. 28-30 for a skills and development camp.

Mike Groves said these big names from the Calgary Roughnecks would be great for young lacrosse players to learn from.

“These guys are basically like Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl of the NLL,” said Groves.

“Dane’s been on the Alberta Lacrosse Association board with me before. So I called him up, and he’s like, ‘Oh, for sure, man. I’ll come out’,” said Groves. “Then he wrangled up Curtis in trying to spark interest, right.”

Dobbie and Dickson formed Driven Lacrosse in 2019, with a goal of providing high-level box and field lacrosse coaching and clinics to kids and coaches of all age groups.

“We ran a little summer program there for some of our kids and it went well this summer with social distancing and stuff,” said Groves.

“But you got to keep that in interest for the kids or they find something else to do.

“I thought maybe I’d try to bring out big names and they want to come because their season isn’t starting till February.”

The camp will have two-hour slots for tyke/novice, peewee, bantam, and midget divisions and each player will get six hours of training through the camp.

Registrations for the camp can be found at drivenlacrosse.com for $175 and GST.

Provincials host 2021

If all goes according to plan at the moment, Bonnyville and Cold Lake will be hosting 2021 Alberta Lacrosse Provincials for U6-U17 competitions.

The massive tournament would be held July 8-11, 2021.

“There’ll be a total of 100, probably about 160 teams,” said Groves.

“The economic impact for both Bonnyville and for Cold Lake will be about $1.5-$2 million.”

Lacrosse competition was cancelled last spring because of heightened health restrictions during the pandemic,

“We’re looking forward to all of it. It’ll be challenging, but we’ll come through.”

“We’re always looking for volunteers for our provincial committee, and our AGM wasn’t well-attended this year, which was due to COVID. We have a few positions on our board that would definitely like to be filled or even just our provincial committee.”