Chesapeake girls lacrosse’s Lexi Vosburg increased mental strength through wrestling, cross country

Lexi Vosburg never thought she’d be plastering the posters to the Chesapeake High walls. The text is plain and blue with a QR code. The images are simple, too: two girls, wrestling.

The message is just as clear: Join the girls wrestling team. Her sister Sara helped Vosburg design them. The Cougars freshman always looked up to her elder twin sisters for lacrosse — they’re equally the inspiration for her picking up the sport at 5 years old in the first place. But this was something she took on herself.

Five girls are committed to compete for Chesapeake’s new girls wrestling team in the winter with more considering it. The minimum requirement for a dual meet is six participants. They don’t intend to wrestle other boys, either; the vision is three more winters of girls-only tournaments.

“We have the singlets ready. I want to grow the sport in the county, just like I want to improve how I do it,” Vosburg said. “These girls coming out, I want to improve. The goal is for us to win counties and win states as a team.”

Before Vosburg attended varsity lacrosse tryouts, she changed her life. First, by trudging through the woods for the first months of school for cross country — becoming the fifth fastest girl in Chesapeake history in the process — and then by stepping into the small wrestling room tucked in a side hallway of the school in the winter.

Each step made her better for the next.

Vosburg is small — the picture of someone who could easily become a quick little point guard for the Chesapeake basketball team — but she never really liked the sport. Instead, she surrounded herself with boys in the wrestling room.

“It was weird,” Vosburg said. “I used to go to my dad’s stuff, so I kind of knew some things. But I remembered the smell the most.”

But truthfully, her father, Chad, a longtime wrestling coach in the county, didn’t expect she’d last more than a few weeks, just as he told her in fourth grade that perhaps lacrosse was not for her. Even Vosburg arrived at that same crossroads after a few tournaments.

But she never backs down from a challenge.

“She’s so driven to win, I ask her if she’s having fun,” Chad said. “But that’s what motivates her.”

Truthfully, Vosburg still needs reminders from her father to forget she’s not good for a freshman — she’s just good. But it’s easy for anyone else to forget watching her play lacrosse. The attacker leads the Cougars with 11 assists to go with 26 goals, 10 caused turnovers and 21 ground balls.

Two years ago, Vosburg adopted draw-taking into her skill set but found she wasn’t exactly a natural. She turned to Huntingtown’s Addison Bartlett, her close friend and club teammate

“She’s really good at the draw, so she pushed me to be better at it,” Vosburg said. “How we do it, it’s different, but they come from the same [source]. And that’s why I stick with it, because she challenges me.”

Vosburg shares time on draws for Chesapeake. She ranks second on the team behind senior Kelsie Payne with 62 controls.

“A lot of people think the draw is a 50-50 ball, but it shouldn’t be,” Vosburg said. “But if you mess it up, your teammates on the circle back you up.”

She attacked every flaw she had. She’s taken “pieces” from family, friends and teammates while unwittingly swapping her own knowledge, her dad said.

There had always been someone to rely on if something needed fixing. That is until she found herself running alone in the woods, or solo on a mat facing down a 120-pound opponent trying to pin her. She absorbed her older sister Kayla’s example of taking on pressure, but had to learn how to do it herself.

She felt it at a Class 3A cross country regional race, where if she didn’t place high enough, she wouldn’t advance. But she did, qualifying for the state meet.

By the last match of her third wrestling tournament, Vosburg felt the last dregs of her energy draining away. Seconds remained; she knew she had to take a shot. No one else was going to do it for her.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. But it brought up my confidence a lot,” she said. “It helped me realize I have to keep going — to take the shot.”

That mental toughening led Vosburg to place second in Anne Arundel County’s first all-girls county tournament. She found the new fortifications in her head didn’t degrade once she returned to lacrosse, either. When the defense slams into her, Vosburg doesn’t let them rattle her.

Her finishing on goals sharpened, Chesapeake lacrosse coach Kaitlyn Hines said, as has her awareness of what shots to take.

“She’s the kind of person who asks to stay longer to train after our three-hour practices,” Hines said. “She just works so hard. She knows what she wants and what it takes to get better and keep improving.”

Hines deployed Vosburg on the draw circle against Annapolis in April. The freshman’s two years of training flooded in as she faced off against a rapidly improved team, just like her Cougars. But a memory of sweat-stinking rubber wafted across her mind, too.

“It brought peace to her,” her father said. “In wrestling, you can’t blame it on anyone else. You own your successes, but you have to own your failures, too. She grasped that quickly.”

I got this, Vosburg thought, and set the program’s single-game draws record with 10.

“She’s just starting,” Hines said. “I think she’s limitless.”

Vosburg compartmentalizes her goals, from setting the school cross country record to pioneering girls-only wrestling at Chesapeake to bringing a state lacrosse title home to Pasadena along with the other two. If she considers it all at once, the weight of it threatens to crush her.

But then again, she knows how to handle pressure.

“I want Chesapeake lacrosse to be remembered, to be one of those teams, in the long run, that’s always in the state game,” Vosburg said, “and I want to be part of it.”