By JUSITN BERNDT

Special to The Oakland Press

COMMERCE – Wayne Jaeckle said his Bloomfield United boys lacrosse team needs to learn how to win. Well, it got a good lesson Wednesday.

University of Detroit Jesuit dominated from the opening faceoff, scoring in the first 30 seconds of play, and never looked back, en route to a 19-6 victory over Bloomfield United in a Division 1 regional semifinal matchup.

“U of D has got an excellent program. They’ve got a culture of lacrosse where kids practice in the offseason,” Jaeckle said. “They play basically all year, where we still have kids who don’t pick up a stick until the first day of spring and expect to come in and be good. It’s a tough, tough sport to play without practicing in the offseason.”

U of D (12-8) outscored Bloomfield United (9-10) in each of the four quarters while heading into halftime with a 13-3 lead.

“We came into this game with a big defensive plan to try to hold the ball,” Bloomfield United senior Travis Scadron said. “It didn’t go the way we wanted it to. Bloomfield is still a growing program and I can’t be that disappointed, it’s our first time making it here. Hopefully, our program will keep growing.”

Like his teammate, senior Alex Lough was disappointed with the result. Nonetheless, he said he’s proud of his high school career.

“I’m going to college to play at Wesleyan University in Connecticut,” he said, “so I’ll be playing a lot and I feel like this is the next moving block.”

Jaeckle is in his first year as head coach. While he doesn’t have the previous experience needed to compare the progress of the program, he hopes the traveling his team did this season will benefit his underclassmen.

“We’ve taken some strides, but obviously we didn’t get as good as I would have liked to have been,” he said. “We did some traveling for the first time. We went to Pittsburgh and played two teams and we had a team come in from Indiana to play us.”

Despite the progress, Jaeckle said his team has to have even more dedication to get to the level of a team like U of D.

“This year all the kids went away for spring break and you really can’t take a week off in the middle of the season and expect to come back and play,” he said. “We’re looking next year to take a trip over spring break and play on the road and go see some college lacrosse.”

The team will lose 15 of its 29 players to graduation, so the results may not be immediate, but Jaeckle said his team is building for what he believes to be a very successful future.

“I’ve got an excellent junior varsity team and a really good group of ninth and tenth graders coming up. I’ve got 20 kids in each grade, which will really help the program,” he said. “We might still have a little bit of an off year next year, but I expect the year after that to be pretty good.”

With the win, the Cubs advanced to the regional finals to face the winner of the Walled Lake Northern-Novi semifinal game. The regional final is scheduled to begin Friday at 7 p.m. at Walled Lake Northern.