After two years of planning, this August, 16 Seattle Prep lacrosse players will embark on a 6-day service trip to a small village near Bogota, Colombia to introduce Lacrosse to Colombian children and volunteer in local classrooms.
Joining the nine boys and seven girls on Prep’s lacrosse teams will be boys lacrosse head coach Sam Bennett and Senorita Palmer, whose Spanish fluency will allow players to connect with locals throughout the trip.
Even with Senorita Palmer joining the trip, the lack of Spanish skills was a frequent concern for students with Macy Shintaffer ’28 saying, “I don’t know a lot of Spanish, so I’m definitely a little uncertain about that.”
Days in Colombia will look like a mixture of service and lacrosse, along with allotted time to interact with Colombian culture. According to Coach Bennett, “Each morning will include service or school tutoring, and in the afternoons, there will be a lacrosse clinic that the students are leading with a little bit of downtime to spend some time in the town and experience Columbian culture.”
Plans for the trip started when Coach Bennett met Anders Bjella, the North American head of the organization Lacrosse the Nations. Lacrosse the Nations is an organization that works with lacrosse teams in the US and brings them down to play and teach lacrosse in less privileged communities in Nicaragua and Colombia.
While lacrosse is a major aspect of this trip, the primary focus is service. Coach Bennett explains, “It’s really beneficial to take kids from these [privileged] environments, broaden their perspectives a little bit, and ingrain some sense of service and global citizenship in them from an early age”.
With the trip on the near horizon, student excitement is higher than ever. Eli Kim ’28 said, “I’m definitely most excited to work with the kids playing lacrosse just because I’ve always liked lacrosse since a young age and started playing in third grade.”
This trip is the first such trip for Seattle Prep and for those feeling FOMO, Coach Bennett provided reassurance, adding, “the hope is that it becomes a biennial service trip.”
If all goes to plan, this trip will become a marquee event for those involved in Seattle Prep Lacrosse, creating foundational memories and a redefined idea of what the sport truly means to them.
