Gold medallist proving her mettle
Niagara teen competing at Ontario championships after winning it all at nationals
Bailey Jacobs takes off the gold medal she won at the Canadian midget girls lacrosse championships and puts her St. Catharines Athletics jersey back on.
Time to get ready to compete at the Ontario championship getting underway Tuesday in Whitby.
Wait a minute, nationals before provincials? Surely, it’s the other way around. Right?
At first Jacobs found that confusing, too.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it,” the 16-year-old from Fort Erie said with a chuckle.
Jacobs, part of an Ontario team that topped the midget division at the 2018 Female Lacrosse Nationals last week in Halifax, isn’t worried provincials will be anticlimactic for her now that she’s a newly minted national gold medallist. She is confident the motivation to succeed with the A’s will be just as high as it was with Team Ontario.
“I think it will be the same,” she said. “We’re all going for the same purpose, to win provincials.”
St. Catharines is going into the Ontario championships after an up-and-down season marred by a lack of success in a rivalry with Kitchener-Waterloo.
“It’s not been our best season, but we can try out best to win provincials,” she said. “I’m pretty confident we can medal, but I’m not sure how far in the medal standings we can get.”
The midget girls Athletics hope to become the second St. Catharines indoor lacrosse team to win it all this summer. Last weekend the bantam boys team won the gold medal at the Ontario championships in Orangeville.
Jacobs, whose family moved to Fort Erie from Toronto two years ago, is in her second season with the Athletics after several years rising through the Toronto Beaches Lacrosse Club ranks.
Ian Scott, one of Bailey’s coaches on the Athletics, encouraged her to try out for Team Ontario. She made the Ontario roster after participating in tryouts in Brampton and Whitby.
“It was pretty competitive,” she recalled. “All of the best girls in Ontario were there.”
Jacobs, who has been playing lacrosse as well as hockey since she was four, never thought about packing it in and going home.
“No, I never thought that, I really enjoyed it.”
Ontario went 4-2 at nationals in Halifax. It avenged 8-4 and 6-3 losses to British Columbia with an 8-3 victory for the gold medal.
Though put together at the last minute, as was the case with the other teams at nationals, Team Ontario gelled almost immediately.
“I think it was just a great group of girls,” Jacobs said. “We had a lot of time off and we went and visited places, we spent a lot of time together.”
Team-bonding off the floor was as important as practice, especially after Ontario fell to 1-2.
“It made us a better team together, because we had a lot of chemistry together.”
Ontario was only one game above .500 heading into the final at nationals but the team didn’t allow that to shift focus from the game plan.
“I think we knew we were better than B.C. overall, so when we got to the final game we knew we were going to win it,” Jacobs said. There wasn’t girls field lacrosse at Greater Fort Erie Secondary School, but that didn’t
keep the daughter of George and Susan Jacobs from playing her favourite sport at the high school level. She effectively turned the boys squad into a co-ed team as the only girl on the Gryphons.
“It was difference,” she said of the experience. “It was kind of like box and field mixed for me.
“It was fun, though. It was a great group of guys.”
She prefers the indoor version of Canada’s national summer sport.
“I just like the speed and the contact,” said Jacobs who, given the choice, would rather be the “cross-checker” than the “cross-checkee.”
“It’s fun to play that way.”
Though the playing surface for field is much larger, Jacobs finds that box lacrosse is more forgiving when it comes to mistakes.
“It’s so much quicker, so if you drop the ball they’ll pick it up but then you can get it back,” she said. “In field, it’s harder to do that.”
Jacobs’ involvement in hockey also dates back to when she was four. Last season she played with the St. Catharines Badgers at the club level as well as on her high school team.
If Jacobs was limited to only one sport, she would choose lacrosse as her go-to game.
“I just have more fun playing it,” she said. “It’s just a fun game.”