Honoring the Game Award Winner:

Roswell Youth Lacrosse Association

As part of the National Youth Sports Awards

Program sponsored by Deloitte, PCA Connector

periodically profiles winners of the Honoring the

Game Award for excellence as an educational

athletic organization. This week, we feature the

Roswell (GA) Youth Lacrosse Association.

Somehow it's fitting that Roswell Youth Lacrosse

Association (RYLA) hosts its major tournament

on Mother's Day weekend. After all, the suburban

Atlanta organization does an extraordinary job serving roughly 500 youth athletes and their families, while drawing inquiries from parents in neighboring communities, who plan to leave their leagues to join RYLA.

"Because we've implemented Positive Coaching Alliance, we've got parents telling us they're pulling their kids from other programs to go into ours," said David Hyman, RYLA's vice president and PCA coordinator. "We reached a tipping point last spring, when we got all our coaches trained by PCA, and that's when I started getting e-mails from parents saying their son or daughter was introverted or in a shell until lacrosse helped them come to life."

The Mother's Day weekend tournament, the Roswell Youth Lacrosse Invitational, draws 110 teams from throughout the Southeast. "Last year we used this tournament to spread the PCA message," Hyman said. "Each coach received PCA buttons and a PCA letter. Due to the PCA concepts, registration for this year's tournament was full in a couple hours, and we have 45 teams on the wait list."

Also new this spring at RYLA: the Face-Off program, co-ed games for 4-to-6-year-olds, whose coaches begin instilling PCA principles such as Honoring the Game. "This helps us get players and parents into PCA at an earlier age, so they're that much more bought into the concepts as they develop competitively," Hyman said.

Other elements of RYLA's program that contributed to its winning the Honoring the Game Award: an effort to spread PCA to other Roswell youth sports organization and an outstanding treatment of PCA on the RYLA website's homepage and dedicated PCA web page.