The Presidents Cup wasn’t quite within their grasp – not this year, anyway.
The Nanaimo Acme Timbermen returned to B.C. earlier this month after a fifth-place finish at the national senior B box lacrosse championships in Kahnawake, Que.
The club will try to draw from the lessons it learned out east.
“Now we know what it takes to compete and where we need to be at,” said Shawn Swanson, the team’s general manager.
The T-men began tournament play with a lopsided loss to the host team, and lost their first four games of the week before coming up with wins over the Capital Region Axemen and the Onondoga Redhawks to wrap up the tourney.
“We were happy we got a few wins and we could easily have been 3-3,” Swanson said.
To be in the running for a Presidents Cup, he said, a team needs to be almost as good as a senior A team – being a strong senior B team doesn’t quite cut it.
“If you’re not destroying teams out here, you’re not going to compete out there,” he said. “We were undermatched offensively. [We need to add] some size up front and guys that are going to cut and do the dirty work.”
He said the Timbermen will also need more size and grit on defence.
The T-men are starting to have the right mindset, said the GM. He said the commitment needs to be year-round, and he thinks guys will have that commitment, because they have the desire.
“They’ve seen it and now they want to get there again,” Swanson said. “There’s a season after our season, is what it showed them.”
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