Despite their 3-6 record, don’t count out the Yorktown Patriots in boys lacrosse just yet this season.
Their record is below .500, but the schedule for the young Patriots has been brutal, one of the toughest in the state, so far during the spring high-school campaign.
Yorktown’s six losses, all in a row, were against perennial top teams that all have winning records.
The losses were against Langley, Madison, Robinson, Broadneck and Oakton on the public-school ranks. They are all teams that have won past state championships. Robinson is the defending Class 6 state title holder and Madison won the same crowns in 2022 and 2023.
Against a private-school squad, Yorktown lost to The Heights.
Combined, those six teams had a 44-14 mark through April 20 action.
Longtime Yorktown coach Greg Beer is not surprised by the losses. With a young team that graduated significant talent from last season’s 14-5 team that won the Liberty District tournament, a rough start was anticipated.
“We were not going to dumb down the schedule just because we are super-young,” Beer told ARLnow. “We knew there would be growing pains. That would help us zero in and figure out what we needed to do to improve.”
In addition to the youth, Yorktown has also be impacted by a flu bug that has caused multiple top players to miss games.
Two of Yorktown’s wins, bookended by those half-dozen losses, were against Centreville, 15-3, and West Springfield, 18-9. The Patriots’ other victory was over the host Wakefield Warriors, 14-3, in an all-Arlington clash.
Ahead, the schedule is more favorable for Yorktown in its final six regular-season matches. One of those is against the Washington-Liberty Generals on Tuesday, May 6 in another all-Arlington clash.
Then the postseason begins for the Patriots, who have been a top district, region and state-tournament playoff performer in recent years. Yorktown won a state title in 2021.
In Yorktown’s recent win over West Springfield, Mikey Cowan had six goals and one assist to help lead the scoring. Nate Randles had five goals and five assists, Eli Pilch had three goals and five assists, Xavier Alford had two goals and Alex Randisi had three assists. Jack Burkholder made eight saves in goal.
Through eight games, Randles had 21 goals and Pilch 19 goals. Randles had 20 assists and Pilch 18. Cowan had 18 goals, Alford eight, and Randisi and Logan Kaetzel each had five assists.
NOTE: Former Yorktown teammates Hudson Greene and Harry Larbalestier, who each graduated this past June, are now members of different Division III college men’s lacrosse teams. Greene, at attackman, plays at Bowdoin College in Maine and Larbalestier, a defenseman, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. The teams met April 19, with Bowdoin winning, 14-10. The players met briefly in the postgame handshake line. Green had scored seven goals and had four assists in 12 matches … Yorktown graduate Patrick Ferguson is a junior defenseman for the U.S. Army men’s team.
