Lake Highland Prep wins
Highlanders take Class 1A state title top Stallions 10-8
NAPLES — The ultimate comeback story ended with a state championship for Lake Highland Prep’s girls lacrosse team Saturday afternoon.
The Highlanders climbed back to the mountaintop, downing American Heritage Delray 10-8 in the Class 1A title game to capture the program’s second state championship, and first since 2019.
“I’ve been at this for so long, and I don’t know if I’ve ever had more gratification than this one,” Lake Highland coach Chris Robinson said. “Just in the sense of that it was such hard work to get our team to be able to rise to the level of that great opponent right there. They are a phenomenal team, and very well coached.
“It’s just euphoric. A euphoric feeling.”
The Highlanders (18-2) opened the game hot, taking a 3-1 lead before the No. 1-ranked Stallions (18-3) scored 4 goals to take a 5-3 lead with 8:27 in the first half. From there, Lake Highland scored 2 goals in a span of just over two minutes to go into the half tied.
Georgetown signee Jacqueline Jaskiewicz led all scorers with 4 goals for the Highlanders, including a critical goal to stretch the lead to 9-6 with 10:45 to play while in the process of bleeding off clock. She and her teammates were adamant about avoiding last year’s heartbreak to the Stallions in the state title game.
“The first thing I did was fall to the ground and burst into tears,” Jaskiewicz said. “It has been months and months of insanely hard work. We deserve this. Every single girl on this team deserved this. I am so proud of them.”
A 1l3-6 loss at American Heritage on March 1 proved to be a wake-up call for Robinson and his team. That was LHP’s worst margin of defeat since losing 17-8 to American Heritage in 2019.
“First time we played them, they tore us apart,” Robinson said. “They picked us apart; a lot of great passing. We put a defense out there today to make them try to do something different, and it worked.”
Jaskiewicz said what she will remember down the road about this team is the team’s slogan, which summed up what the team felt that it had to do.
“Our slogan this year was ‘Something to Prove,’ “Jaskiewicz said. “We had something to prove this season, and we proved it. We did our job, and I will 100 percent always remember that. I’ll never forget this team.”