Beckett Kinlaw got the first chance to trim.
From the time the Orange Middle School lacrosse team lost to Roxboro Community School in March, Head Coach David O’Neal decided to take a page from hockey two months before the Carolina Hurricanes started its run to the Stanley Cup.
He started growing a playoff beard.
O’Neal made a deal with his players. If they won the Orange Person Athletic Conference championship, at the team celebration, each player would get one stroke of a razor to shave it off.
“Some of them were a little scared to do it,” O’Neal said. “Some of them, not so much. Some were ready to gouge me right in the skin.”
After early losses to RCS, Phillips and Rogers-Herr, Orange Middle started piling up victory after victory until they reached the OPAC Championship game in Chapel Hill in early May.
By that point, O’Neal looked like Grizzly Adams.
Against Phillips, eighth grader Beckett Kinlaw scored the game-winning goal in the final minute of regulation as the Chargers won 9-8 over the Falcons to win the OPAC Championship to finish the year 11-3.
Days later, O’Neal was left with a goatee.
“I was happy to get a shave,” O’Neal said. “I don’t know if I would have chosen these children as barbers, though. But it was a good bet to motivate them.”
Rawls and Kinlaw were the top two scorers for the Chargers. Longstick midfielder Sam Wilking, another 8th grader, missed several games but returned for the stretch run and proved to be invaluable in keeping the OMS offense a step ahead.
“Phillips coach told me that you rarely see a team play a long-stick midfielder offensively the entire game,” O’Neal said. “That really helped us because Sam can shoot it from outside of the box. The defense has to adjust to take and that means we can do some things differently.”
Rawls would often run the offense from behind the net while Kinlaw varied his shooting range to keep opposing goalkeepers off balance. Jayden Gutierrez, a running back in football, earned win after win in the face-off circle.
The defense was led by eighth graders like Wesley Detwiler, Ben Runkle, Simon Snell, Harrison Hayes, and Tyler Mangum. Goalkeeper Ryan Vaughan played his best as a championship season wound to a close.
7th graders like Marco Guarda and Luke Mavin also proved versatility.
“Luke is a hockey player,” O’Neal said. “He can play long pole. He can play short stick. He has a low shot that really confuses people. We had so many combinations of long poles that we could put in.”
Since Orange Middle doesn’t field a women’s team, there were female players on the squad like Maddie Keatts, Katelyn Williams, Evelyn Canales, Annabelle Lee and Charlotte Perduta Silva who provided valuable minutes.
“Watching them develop from the beginning to the end is the most rewarding thing about coaching Orange Middle,” O’Neal said. “Seeing the students develop from absolutely nothing was the most valuable thing.”
O’Neal, a former coach at Orange High, won the Panthers first state playoff game. The Orange Middle program started in 2003 under its previous incarnation of Stanford Middle under Ted Kellet, who eventually started the program when Gravelly Hill Middle opened.
“It’s been rewarding,” O’Neal said. “It’s been great to see them grow and I just love to see the players grow. I love how this team was able to get this championship and make this memory.”
Inside a training room at Orange Middle, O’Neal would tape the dimensions of a goal crease where young net minders like Jackson Runkle would cut their teeth. When it rained, Runkle would field shots like he was flippers in a pinball game. Last spring, Runkle was the main goalkeeper as the Orange High lacrosse team captured its sixth consecutive conference championship.
Starting a lacrosse program in the mid-2000s, with the majority of players deriving from northern Orange County, wasn’t easy. Hillsborough was in the shadow of Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill, which started programs in the mid-1990s, long before the sport was sanctioned by the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. Legendary North Carolina head coach Willie Scroggs, a Hall of Famer who won four National Championships with the Tar Heels, frequently attended games and practices at Chapel Hill High. In 2005, Chapel Hill and East Chapel Hill played for the State Championship in Cary, overseen by the North Carolina Lacrosse Association.
Meanwhile in Hillsborough, O’Neal presided over the only perfect season Stanford ever had.
“We lost every single game,” O’Neal said.
21 years later, Orange Middle had 40 players suit up. In all, 20 8th graders are moving on to Orange High School, where they will start classes in three weeks as freshmen. But there will be 20 8th graders for next spring.
“On some nights, we wore out the opposition with our depth,” O’Neal said. “We’re looking for back-to-back championships.”
