SPARKS, Md. — It’s the first thing you do when you join a new team. You introduce yourself and get to know your new teammates. For the players in the Athletes Unlimited league, they get to do that every week.
"The format is kind of similar to a fantasy football thing," said defender Kayla Wood.
It’s season No. 3 for the professional women's lacrosse league and it gets underway Thursday at USA Lacrosse headquarters in Sparks. There are no coaches. There are no managers. Just 56 of the best players on the planet trying to rack up points to be atop the leaderboard.
"[The] top four players at the end of the week get to choose their teams and draft them," described Wood.
There are 14 players chosen per roster and ten players per team playing on a smaller-than-standard field. The winner at the end of the four-week season won’t be the team with the most points. It will be the player with the most points. Those are accumulated by individual and weekly team accomplishments.
"You can have new teammates every single week. You can maybe end up never playing on the same team as someone. But, it’s cool to have the opportunity to at least play with lots of different players who all have different skills and abilities," said Wood.
"It’s cool to all come together and people I’ve looked up to like Sam Apuzzo, I’ve watched her games a bunch of times but I’ve never actually got to play with her on a team," said midfielder Sam Fiedler.
This week Fiedler, a Reisterstown native and Loyola grad, gets that chance. For Fiedler and Catonsville’s Wood, this season is about more than leaderboard positioning. It’s about setting a positive example for the young women watching.
"This kind of gives them an opportunity to have a female athlete in the sport that they play that they see continue to go up another level," said Fiedler. "That wasn’t always reachable."
"It’s just an incredible honor to be able to be a part of something so big and so special and especially unique and kind of just be paving the way for the sport and being trailblazers for those younger kids that look up to us," said Wood.
Thursday’s games get going 5:00 p.m. with Team Mastroianni taking on Team Apuzzo. Then at 7:30 p.m. Team Moreno faces off against Team Read.
Follow Shawn Stepner on Twitter @StepnerWMAR and Facebook
