To provide our community (and its surrounding communities) the best possible youth Athletic Programs, the Lake Forest Parks and Recreation Department has begun to move in a different direction with its Girls Athletic Programs. We have partnered with various independent sport specific organizations as well as the Lake Bluff Park District to help enhance our Girls Athletic Programs’ attributes and to help alleviate any issues that have impeded their success in the past. Such programs as Girls Field Hockey and Lacrosse have become mainstream sports in the Women’s Athletics world over the past several years and we are striving to offer the best programs in those areas as we can, along with Women’s Basketball.

With that said, we partnered with Illinois Girls Lacrosse Association, IGLA, in 2008 and have run an exceptional Girls Lacrosse program ever since. IGLA specializes in providing female coaches with college to professional lacrosse playing or coaching experience. We have seen our program expand from 20 girls in the fall of 2007 (partnered with another organization) to 61 girls in the spring of 2010. We only anticipate those numbers increasing in the future. Girls in this program practice once a week and then play games against surrounding communities within the IGLA umbrella on Sunday afternoons.

In regards to Field Hockey, we have just recently partnered with Sports Made Personal, SMP, which is a sport specific training organization specializing in running leagues and also offering sport specific one on one training sessions in various sports. Coaching is their specialty, bringing in collegiate and professional players/coaches, and they now bring that specialization in Field Hockey to the Lake Forest Parks & Recreation Department. We have seen a steady program here at the Recreation Center over the past few years but with the goal of offering a better, more specialized program, SMP was brought aboard to help us run a unique Field Hockey Program. Two programs with SMP will be offered at the Lake Forest Recreation Department; a Saturday morning program featuring 30 minutes of practice time and about 1 hour of game/scrimmage play as well as a supplemental practice program which will meet during the week and will utilize the time working on skill development.

As also mentioned above, we have partnered with the Lake Bluff Park District in several of our Athletic Programs and while we are cooperating efforts in many areas, Girls Basketball is the focus here. We will be utilizing gym space in both communities, expanding the diversity of competition, incorporating more kids and will be able to offer an overall better basketball experience through our cooperative efforts this coming season. We will be offering Girls Basketball in 1^st/2^nd grade, 3^rd/4^th grade and 5^th/6^th grade between the communities.

In addition to the efforts within the girls’ athletics area, we are beginning to expand this type of programming into the boys’ athletic programs where we still strive to offer the best Youth Athletic Programs that we can.  We will be expanding our efforts and communication with the Lake Bluff Park District to see where further joint programming makes sense and possibly into other Park District boundaries to increase the amount of teams and raise the level of competition for all of our participants.  This idea of cooperative programming will allow all of us to continue to offer high quality programs, giving all of the young athletes an opportunity to play the sports that they enjoy in the best scenario possible.

If you have any questions on the above, please contact Anthony Anaszewicz, Program Supervisor in Athletics at the Lake Forest Parks & Recreation Department at 847-810-3945 or by email at, anaszewa@cityoflakeforest.com. To view and/or sign up for our Athletic Programs, please visit www.lfrec.com.