Basic Cradling in Women's Lacrosse

Video Transcript

"Alright, so when you're playing lacrosse, you're generally running down the field and you've got the ball and so you don't just jar the ball right out of your stick when you're running. We do something called "cradling". It's basically, the point of cradling is to keep the ball in possession, to keep control of the ball and also to be able to dodge players when they try to check the ball out of your stick or hit the your stick with their stick and hit the ball out and get possession of it. There's different ways to do it, lots of different ways to cradle but the basic cradle, you kind of put your elbow onto your side and you pretend like it's glued there and it acts like a hinge to the door. And you're holding the top of your stick as well and they kind of, your hands need to move in unison like you're opening and closing the door and your elbows would be like the hinge, to follow with that metaphor. With the ball it looks something like this. Some points that you want to pay attention to: players cannot check or hit your stick in between your hands, so the further you hold them apart, the less area they have to check. So that's a smart way to hold your stick so you can't get checked as easily. Like holding it here there's a lot of area that players can hit my stick to get the ball out. So you just do like this and this is the basic cradle."