DEXTER, New York (WWNY) – The General Brown boys’ lacrosse team finished last season with an 11-5 overall record — 8-2 in the Frontier League — and lost in the Section III Class D semifinals to Westhill.
This will be a transition year for General Brown.
The team lost 11 players to graduation and longtime head coach Rich Purvis stepped down.
Replacing Purvis is former JV head coach Andrew Derouin.
“Yeah, coach Purvis and coach Parker, they’ve been great for the program for, I feel, like forever now.” Derouin said. “Got big shoes to fill, but we’ve got a great team. We’ve got great returning talent, a lot of young guys, but I think we’re in a good spot.”
While the Lions lost four of their top seven scorers due to graduation, they return two big offensive pieces in Hayden Coney, who had 29 goals last season, and Gabe Malcolm, who tallied 17 goals to go along with 15 assists in 2021.
With such a young team, both Coney and Malcolm know it will take a lot of hard work both on and off the field for the team to be successful this season.
“It’s not bad,” Coney said. “Last year we had a lot of good kids on the team, lot of seniors and we’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. Let’s hope we can get it better this year.”
“We lost a lot of seniors, probably, like, nine out of our 10 guys were seniors,” Malcolm said. “We’re a very young team so it’s going to take a lot of work to get to be where we need to be.”
“It’s very young, so it’s going to be a very questionable season,” Kaleb Natali said. “We don’t have a lot of chemistry together, so it’s going to be all in how we play.”
The Lions open up their 2022 season on Tuesday, hosting Lowville in their Frontier League opener at Fisher Field.
The league continues to improve each year and should be competitive from top to bottom this season.
“Yeah, it’s getting better, too,” Derouin said. “We got a lot of summer stuff going on, great kids coming out to do summer work. Pretty even league this year, I would say, and each year, you know, it’s getting better and better. Looking forward to where we’re at now and going into the future.”
A tough early season schedule will tell whether the Lions will be ready to compete for a Frontier League title with such a young roster.
Thursday’s local scores
Women’s college lacrosse
SUNY Potsdam 23, SUNY Poly 1
College baseball
Finger Lakes 6, Jefferson 3
Finder Lakes 4, Jefferson 2
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