Coach Nate Lutterman Sees Cards as “Against the World … Together”
“We are in an extremely good situation from a talent perspective,” says new Varsity Head Coach Nate Lutterman.
Coming on board to lead the Middleton coaching staff after serving as head coach at his alma mater Verona from 2015 to 2020, Lutterman is taking the helm of a team that boasts four players already committed to play D-1 lacrosse in college, a number practically unheard of for Wisconsin, where lacrosse has only just become an officially sanctioned high school sport.
His challenge, he says, isn’t in player development, but rather in developing a team culture.
“We need to cement our team identity,” he says. “I think that we are extremely talented individually. I don’t think that we are quite yet fully comfortable with and trusting of one another. I think that’s our biggest room for growth.”
Drawing on his own experience as a high school player, Lutterman believes that it’s not necessarily a team’s star players who determine its destiny. Instead, he says, “the difference between a championship team and a team that loses in the semis or the quarterfinals is whether those ‘glue’ guys, the guys at the end of the bench, are fully bought in, are fully committed.”
Lutterman says one of his primary goals for this year’s team is to help them learn to handle adversity better, a lesson he hopes will hold value on and off the field.
“Competition is one of the best opportunities for young men to grow because it teaches you to fail. That’s one of the things people struggle with the most in life … understanding how to overcome adversity, keeping yourself focused, setting goals,” he says.
To that end, Lutterman and the coaching staff say they’re approaching the start of the season as one phase in a long progression.
“The beginning of the season is very much figuring out who we are and who everyone on our roster is,” he says. “Respectfully, I don’t care if we lose regular season games while becoming a better playoff team. Our goal is early on in the season is to communicate that it’s okay to make mistakes. We want a player to make that extra pass. We want them to be trusting their teammates.”
Lutterman has instituted several changes for the team marking his new approach, including mandatory player kits that have all 58 team members sporting identical practice and warm up clothes, and early morning yoga sessions in addition to traditional evening practices.
He notes that while the changes aren’t necessarily one hundred percent popular, they are unifying.
“The morbid way to describe it might be ‘the prison mentality,’” he jokes. “We want them to feel like they are against the world but together. They’re in it together.”
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