Billy Hussy and the
Best Recruiting Pitch
I Ever Heard

Billy Hussy was the captain of my Rep AAA hockey team. Short, explosive, a natural leader. The kind of kid who didn’t need to say much because when he did, you listened.

One spring he came to me with a proposition. There was a lacrosse team being put together. Mostly the same guys from the hockey team, which should have told me something about the sport right there. And he had one line to sell me on it.

“You can crosscheck people,” he said. “And you won’t get a penalty.”

I was hooked before the first practice.

What followed was years of learning the game and all of its wonderful lessons. Keep your head on a swivel. Drop your shoulder when you’re cutting around a pick. Don’t complain about the bruises on your arms. And when you’re on. Run as fast as you can.

The shifts are short. There’s no coasting. You go until they pull you, and then you go again.

As my dad used to say: speed kills. Lacrosse taught me what he meant.

The Wall Doesn’t
Lie to You.

Every lacrosse athlete knows the wall.

Not team practice. Not a coach watching from the sideline. The wall is what you do alone. An Indian rubber ball, a brick wall, and whatever time you have. You throw. The ball comes back. You catch it. You throw again. Over and over, for hours, in the heat or the cold, with nobody watching and nobody clapping.

You can get lost in it. The rhythm of it. The ball finds the cracks in the bricks and comes back at strange angles and you learn to adjust without thinking about adjusting. You get better without knowing you’re getting better. A thousand throws. Five thousand. You stop counting.

The wall is a strict teacher. It has no patience for half-measures. A bad throw comes back as a bad catch. Or no catch at all. There’s no way to cheat it, no way to pretend. You either caught it or the ball bounced past you and you have to go pick it up off the ground and start again.

No spectators. No fanfare. No buddy to tell you you’re doing well.

Just you and the wall, and the slow accumulation of something real.

I didn’t understand at the time what those hours were building. I was just a kid throwing a ball. But that kind of solitary, repetitive, unspectacular work, done consistently, for years, without anyone making you, creates a particular type of person.

You’ve met them. They don’t talk much. They don’t need to.

Boots.

It was summer. Hot and humid the way only southern Ontario can be. We were in full gear, helmets included, running laps around the outside of the rink.

Thirteen or fourteen years old. The laps felt endless. Each time I came around the bend I could see Billy Hussy’s dad standing there at the same spot. Watching. Not saying anything. Just watching.

Every lap I genuinely hoped that this one would be the last. That when I came around again he’d raise his hand and call it. That the suffering would be mercifully over.

Each time: nothing. He stood there. Stoic. Said nothing. You kept running.

I was exposed early in life to Kipling’s poem “Boots.” It was written about British soldiers in the Boer War. The relentless, grinding march from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. Hundreds of miles on foot. The psychological weight of endless repetition. Not battle. Just the marching. Always more marching.

That’s lacrosse conditioning in that era. No stopping. No discharge in the war. You run until you’re told to stop, and you’re not told to stop for a very long time.

It sounds brutal. It was. But something happens to you in those laps. You stop fighting the repetition and you learn to inhabit it. You find a rhythm inside the suffering. You discover that you can keep going past the point where you thought you couldn’t.

That lesson doesn’t leave you.

The Picks and Screens
Aren’t Why They
Move So Well.

Ask most people why box lacrosse players are exceptional movers and you’ll get the same answer: the picks, the screens, the constant change of direction, the physicality of the game.

That’s part of it. But it’s not the reason.

The reason is the wall. The reason is Boots. The reason is that lacrosse, more than almost any other sport, selects for and develops people who will do the same thing alone, without applause, for as long as it takes, until it’s right. That mentality precedes the sport skills. It’s what makes the sport skills possible at all.

And it’s what makes lacrosse players respond to a very specific kind of training: the kind where you do a drill, watch the video of yourself doing it, hear one cue, and do it again. One rep at a time. No shortcuts. No pretending.

The wall already taught them how to do this. They just didn’t know they were being prepared.

When Everyone’s
Already Good, the
Margin Is Precision.

Box lacrosse at the competitive level has a problem most sports don’t. Everyone is already a good mover. The picks and screens and concrete floor have seen to that. The physical contact has built strength most youth athletes in other sports don’t have until years later.

So when everyone can change direction, when everyone is strong and fast and physical. What separates the best from the very good?

Not more conditioning. Not more skill work. Precision. The fractional improvements in how the cut is executed. The shin angle at the plant foot. The timing of the deceleration going into the change. Things invisible to the eye. Visible on video. And things that compound over thousands of repetitions.

Entry into the cut. Foot placement, shin angle, centre of mass. Coached explicitly, every rep.

The plant and redirect. One cue. Then go again. The wall mentality, applied to mechanics.

Video feedback between every set. Not at the end of the session. The athlete watches. Gets one cue. Goes again. This is not complicated. But it requires the willingness to do the same thing repeatedly, receive honest feedback, and not flinch from it.

Lacrosse players already know how to do that. The wall taught them.

Hand to the post confirms full deceleration before re-acceleration. The hardest thing to train. And the thing that creates separation at the elite level in box lacrosse.

Exxentric KBOX. Building the eccentric tissue resilience to brake hard, repeatedly, all game. Box lacrosse is physical and long. The athlete who maintains deceleration quality into the third period has an advantage that grows as the game does.

Woodway Force. The first four to six explosive steps after the cut. Pure neural work. This is where the separation appears on the floor.

He Walked In
at 12.
Didn’t Say Much.

Ashton Craddock came in the way lacrosse players come in. Quiet. Observant. Not there to perform for anyone. Just there to work.

He already had the wall in him. You could tell. Not because he said anything about it. He didn’t. But because of the way he took a cue. Heard it once. Processed it. Applied it on the next rep without needing it repeated. That kind of coachability doesn’t come from talent. It comes from years of being alone with something hard and learning to self-correct.

Session after session. One block on top of the next. The coordination drills that felt strange. The cutting mechanics that took weeks to click. The gym work that was hard and slow and didn’t feel like lacrosse training at all. The video between every set. One cue, go again.

Quietly. Determinedly. In the shadows.

No proclamations. Just the work.

A very high ceiling, this one. Still getting better. Still observing. Still working.

Thousands of
Kilometres Away.
Exactly the Same.

My second lacrosse career was in Calgary. Senior Mountaineers. A man now, not a kid, but stepping back onto the floor and finding the same sport waiting for me.

Same concrete. Same shifts. Same requirement to run as fast as you can when you’re on. Same bruises on the forearms that you don’t complain about. Same culture of people who’d been to the wall and back enough times that they didn’t need to announce it to anyone.

That’s the thing about lacrosse. It doesn’t change. The wall is the wall whether you find it in southern Ontario or Calgary. Whether you’re 13 or 33. It asks the same thing of you every time.

The sport selects for people who answer that ask without making a fuss about it.

And those people, when they show up in a training environment that matches their mentality, that gives them specific feedback and asks them to apply it one rep at a time, respond in a way that other athletes take much longer to develop.

The wall already did the work. We just build on top of it.

What This Looks
Like in Practice

Jungle Athletics in Calgary trains box lacrosse athletes ages 8–14 using video feedback, progressive deceleration mechanics, and movement training built on the same developmental framework used in Olympic-level sport. Every athlete starts with a Free Game Speed Analysis: 60 minutes at our facility at 134 71 Ave SE in Calgary, where we assess movement quality, deceleration capacity, and which training program is the right fit. No obligation. No sales pitch. Just clarity on where your athlete is and what would move them forward.

The athletes who respond best to this training are the ones who already know what it means to work alone without applause. Lacrosse players, in our experience, almost always qualify.