 |
At age 20, Sarah Bullard of Needham is the youngest player on Team USA. She earned third-team All-America honors at Duke. |
Four suit up for World Cup
Lacrosse players make Prague squads
Four local players, Sarah Bullard, Vanessa Cox, Kristen Haldeman, and Kristin Blanchette, will be wearing uniforms representing three different countries at the Women’s World Cup lacrosse championship games, which kick off today in Prague.
Bullard, a 20-year-old midfielder from Needham who earned third-team All-America honors as a sophomore at Duke, is the youngest player on Team USA.
A high school All-American in lacrosse at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Bullard was captain of the under-19 national team that won the world title in 2007.
“I’m not sure if I would be here now if not for the experience I had with the U-19 team,’’ Bullard wrote in an e-mail from the Czech Republic this week. “It really drove me to want to try out as soon as possible’’ for Team USA.
Cox, head women’s lacrosse coach at MIT, was a prolific scorer back at Newton North High and the University of Vermont, and is playing on the front line for Team Canada at the World Cup. She is joined by her assistant at MIT, Haldeman, a Watertown resident who was a goalkeeper for the University of Connecticut squad.
Cox is eligible to play for Canada because her mother, Micheline, holds dual US-Canadian citizenship, while Haldeman was born in Nova Scotia, although she grew up in Pennsylvania.
The US and Canadian squads are in Pool A along with Australia, which defeated the US squad in the last World Cup finals, held in Maryland four years ago. Since the first international women’s lacrosse championship in 1982, Australia and the United States are the only countries that have won the title, with America holding a 5-2 edge.
Team Ireland, making its first World Cup appearance and assigned to Pool C, was able to field a full squad through an exemption that allowed half of its 18 players to come from the United States.
The Irish squad includes Blanchette, a former Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High and University of New Hampshire standout who is an assistant women’s lacrosse coach for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Most of the Americans are of Irish descent, but it was not a requirement.
“I went to the 2001 World Cup in England when I was a junior in high school,’’ Blanchette wrote in an e-mail, “and since that time it’s been a dream of mine to play in a World Cup. I’m also hoping we can help the sport grow in Ireland.’’
Marvin Pave can be reached at marvin.pave@rcn.com. 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
