Hakeem Lecky figured he would give it a try.

The high school freshman hadn’t perfected passing and catching with a lacrosse stick and cradling was a whole other challenge, but he started tossing the ball around for fun after school with his friends. Each drop slowed the game down, so with every catch, he focused on keeping it in the head of the stick and returning a crisp pass to maintain the game.

‘Every day after school, I would play pass with them and go to their practices and watch,’ Lecky said. ‘I slowly started learning things here and there.’

That was the beginning of Lecky’s lacrosse career.

Before then, Lecky endured a challenging journey. He moved from his hometown of Port Antonio, Jamaica, to Nantucket, Mass., with his family when he was 8, a change that shook up his life but introduced him to the sport that is now his focus. One dominant performance in a football game that caught the eye of a local coach initiated a lacrosse career that has carried Lecky to the peak of the sport. Now a starting midfielder for Syracuse, Lecky had to overcome long odds just to step onto the field with the Orange.

During Lecky’s time in Jamaica, sports weren’t on his radar. Living in a resort town on the country’s northern coast, Lecky never played soccer, the country’s most popular sport, and had never even heard of lacrosse.

‘My childhood was much different,’ Lecky said. ‘To be honest, when I was younger, at that age before I left, I really wasn’t that much into sports. I was just really a family-oriented kid.’

When Lecky moved to Nantucket, his life underwent a dramatic change. He spent time living with his mother, but when she moved off the island in Massachusetts, Lecky stayed behind and lived with his best friend, Caio Correa, a then-budding soccer star.

While Correa dominated on the soccer field, Lecky made his mark on the Nantucket High School junior varsity football special teams unit as a kickoff returner and wide receiver.

As a sophomore returner, Lecky returned two kickoffs for touchdowns against rival Martha’s Vineyard in the 2006 Island Cup.

Watching from the sideline, Kevin Martin took notice. He believed Lecky was perfect for lacrosse. His speed was evident. His athleticism was unmatched.

All he needed was a lacrosse stick in his hands.

Martin knew Lecky as a standout football player, but little else about the Jamaica native. At the time, Martin was a lacrosse coach at Nantucket. He started to get to know Lecky. He became like a brother to Lecky.

Martin also gave Lecky his first lacrosse stick and taught him the sport in detail.

‘He only started out his freshman year so he sort of had to catch up. We were always playing lacrosse,’ Martin said. ‘In the summer, we’d bring him to the beach, and he’d always be playing lacrosse. He really took a liking to it.’

The first time Martin taught Lecky how to get open on a lacrosse field. Lecky ran a wide receiving pattern, taking a hard left and hard right.

Once he learned, though, he never forgot.

‘His first JV game, he had a few practices, and I think he scored four goals and had like five assists,’ Martin said. ‘It was unbelievable, so right away.’

Meanwhile, Correa returned to his native Brazil to pursue professional soccer. For a moment, Lecky was left without a place to live, just as he was hitting his stride as a lacrosse player. But one of Martin’s roommates moved out, and the open bedroom was offered to Lecky.

This temporary living situation became permanent. Martin lived with two other roommates, and Lecky quickly became one of their own.

For Christmas one year, Martin and his roommates set up a rebound wall for Lecky outside the house. Every morning after that, Lecky would go out as early as 6 a.m. and take shot after shot against the wall, working on his technique. When he perfected a split dodge to the left, he went inside and asked Martin to teach him how to take behind-the-back shots.

‘I always told him he’d have to be playing when others weren’t playing so he could catch up,’ Martin said. ‘He took that to heart.’

As Lecky improved, he began to surpass the talent level at Nantucket, and Martin knew he needed to face a higher level of competition. Midway through his junior season, Martin became Lecky’s legal guardian and the two moved to Duxbury, Mass., where Lecky could play on one of the most premier lacrosse teams in New England. In the last 10 seasons, the Duxbury boys’ lacrosse team has won eight state championships.

If opponents were going to expose his weaknesses, it would be playing against elite competition for Duxbury.

But those weaknesses were never exposed.

‘He came in and he was still raw his junior year for us,’ Duxbury head coach Chris Sweet said. ‘But certainly his athleticism got him on the field. He just got better and better and better. I think he continues to get better.’

Lecky’s primary role his junior season was to clear the ball because of his effectiveness in the open field. The team called him ‘the human clear,’ Sweet said.

Lecky led Duxbury to two championships. After holding a spot on the second midfield line his junior year, he became a star his senior season in 2009. He was named an Under Armour and U.S. Lacrosse All-American after scoring 27 goals and had 15 assists.

Those two championships, though, are two of his proudest moments.

‘It was something I’d looked forward to playing lacrosse through high school,’ Lecky said. ‘It was a great feeling.’

Division-I schools sent offers to Lecky left and right. Martin said Lecky had two conditions when looking at college teams. Tired of moving around, Lecky wanted to stay in the Northeast. And he wanted a chance at winning a championship at the collegiate level.

Martin said Lecky liked the ‘family atmosphere’ at Syracuse.

Lecky committed to SU at the end of his senior season, but Martin felt another year of maturing both emotionally and physically would prove beneficial once Lecky started college.

Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut provided the perfect setting.

Avon head coach Skip Flanagan said Lecky needed to learn that he didn’t have to do everything himself, that he could draw a double team and find the open man to create offense for teammates. As the season progressed, he started to do that more and more, and the whole team reaped the rewards.

‘Once he did that, he became a more effective player,’ Flanagan said, ‘and also, frankly, made our entire offense jell because he received so much attention that it left other very capable players a little less well guarded.’

In one game against Brunswick, a team from Greenwich, Conn., Lecky scored five goals in a four-minute span, Flanagan said. Avon finished the season 15-3 and won the Founder’s League title.

When Lecky arrived at Syracuse last season, he was one of 19 true freshmen coming in to a team that had solidified spots up and down the field. Lecky had the potential to break through. Head coach John Desko said he planned for the young midfielder to play on the second midfield line.

A preseason wrist injury, though, curbed those plans.

‘I thought we would start with him out there and kind of build around him on that second midfield, and maybe even bring him up once in a while to run with the older group to give him some experience,’ Desko said.

After redshirting last season, everything has worked out.

Lecky now starts on the Orange’s first midfield line with veterans JoJo Marasco and Bobby Eilers. In his first collegiate season, Lecky has proven he’s more than capable of playing right at their level.

‘He’s always had that speed and change of direction, which is huge,’ Marasco said. ‘… I think he’s a great player, he’s really fun to play with, and I can’t wait to play the rest of the season with him.’

It has been a journey that has taken Lecky from Jamaica to New England and finally to Syracuse. Flanagan called it ‘a Cinderella story,’ with Lecky reaching the top of his sport just a few years after learning how to play it, all while having to move around and readjust along the way.

Lecky and lacrosse proved to be a perfect match. The more he played, the better he became.

He has reached the height of college lacrosse, where his natural abilities are going to shine under the brightest lights.

Said Desko: ‘He’s going to be exciting and fun to watch for Syracuse fans.’

cjiseman@syr.edu

Published on February 27, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Chris: cjiseman@syr.edu | @chris_iseman