It’s the year 2005 and Will Jeffery has just been named an All-State Athlete. Fast forward to this year, he’s back to share his experience and knowledge with the Glenbrook South men’s lacrosse program. Jeffery was hired this year to be the new head coach for the very team he played on.

Jeffery was part of the lacrosse program while in high school. After, he went on to play Division One at the University of Massachusetts and is now working on his degree in special education while coaching lacrosse at GBS.

“[Coaching] is a career choice for one and I’m definitely drawn to the program and hope it rises to the top,” Jeffery said.

According to Assistant Coach Michael Macfadden, when the job for head coach opened up a lot of people knew that Jeffery would be good for the job.

“It’s hard to have a better pedigree than [Jeffery] has, being a division one athlete [and] coaching at the division three level for two years,” Macfadden said. “He has upped the expectation of our players and brought a comprehensive system of play that will benefit us this season.”

According to Jeffery, the major themes of this season are accountability and humility. To achieve these things, the team have been writing down all their goals to make sure they achieve them, and have been going on community service projects throughout the preseason. Senior Captain McLain Murphy says that has really helped them come together as a team.

“Together as a program, we’ve learned to be humble throughout these community service projects and we’ve found a togetherness,” Murphy said.

Murphy said the team participated in Feed My Starving Children and went to an inner city school to teach students how to play lacrosse. As a program, they have fifteen community service hours and 659 individual hours, according to Jeffery.

 “We’ve got a lot of community service hours [and] I was blown away and didn’t realize how much we were doing as a team,” Jeffery said.

EJ Reynolds, senior captain and defender, says that he and Murphy met with Jeffery in the fall to see what he had in mind for the team this season.

“[Jeffery] said he wants to implement schemes and things from different levels of play from lacrosse,” Reynolds said. “He does a great job of picking and choosing what works best for our team.”

According to Jeffery, each player needs to be treated and coached as an individual in order to get the whole team motivated and be able to play together.

“Some guys I can push really hard,” Jeffery said. “A guy like McLain Murphy I can scream at and he’s only going to get better because of it. [Then] there’s other guys who need positive reinforcement, I definitely treat each player differently.”

Macfadden, Reynolds, and Murphy all agree that it’s Jeffery’s experience with lacrosse that makes him different from past coaches.

However, the Titans have had three head coaches in the past four years. According to Murphy, it’s hard on the whole team to change every aspect of their game every year because of the different coaches.

“It’s been a difficult couple of years, but [Jeffery] came in and knew exactly what he wanted to do and has done that,” Murphy said.

“[Jeffery has] taught even myself and I’ve been playing for six, seven years,” Murphy said. “He’s taught me many things I didn’t even know I was doing wrong. He’s brought a lot of knowledge from his college experience into our program [and] that’s one thing he has brought to the table rather than our past coaches.”

According to Reynolds, the transition between coaches has been tough, but Jeffery has exceeded his expectations.

 “[Jeffery] is by far my favorite,” Reynolds said. “He’s thrown a lot at us, obviously higher expectations, but I think the team has really risen to the challenge.”