It took just 2 1/2 minutes in front of a national audience for Remi Schaller to announce herself to the world.
The junior attacking midfielder for the Owings Mills McDonogh (Md.) girls’ lacrosse team is a player who is already on one of the nation’s most storied school teams, and has already committed to the University of Michigan starting in the fall of 2024.
But in yesterday’s game against Olney Good Counsel (Md.), your defending WCAC champions, Schaller arrowed in an 8-meter free position. Or, perhaps “arrowed” isn’t the proper word. She launched the ball like a SpaceX, and the ball exploded in the top corner.
It was the first of her five goals, most of which came from the 8-meter arc on one-step shots that nobody on the Falcons team could figure out how to stop. Of course, she wasn’t alone, as many of McDonogh’s 21 goals against Good Counsel game on free position opportunities — and at a very high percentage.
It would be easy to point to the Charlotte North knock-on effect as to why Schaller and a number of other top scholastic lacrosse prospects have turned the game of lacrosse into a free-throw-shooting contest like it was in the late 1980s. After all, the former Boston College product turned herself into an unstoppable force at the 8, even against goaltenders who are a far sight better than their counterparts in the wooden-stick era of the game.
Of course, it will be interesting to see if Schaller is able to have the same kind of scoring prowess at the next level against well-trained and physically imposing goalies. The odds are that it will be harder to have the same kind of percentage of scoring in the rough-and-tumble Big Ten. But Schaller’s uncommon physicality will make it fin to watch.
