The Borrell brothers have been playing lacrosse since before they can even remember.
“My uncle on my dad’s side played and was a very good lacrosse player,” said Will, 18, a senior captain on the Amherst Regional boys lacrosse team. “Apparently when I was born he gave me a tiny lacrosse stick when I was 2 weeks old or something like that.”
Will and his brother Tyler, 16, are the leading scorers for the Hurricanes (4-11), with Tyler leading the team in assists. They have an older brother Lee, who was a senior defensive captain last year.
“It wasn’t a brother vs brother thing but was more of a family thing,” Tyler said. “Even the family dog Buddy loved lacrosse balls more than all of us combined. If you slid your hand across a lacrosse stick he would run up to your room with a ball in his mouth and demand to go outside. So just that feeling of our dog even loving lacrosse I feel made me so much better and motivated to practice. Behind our net, there is a hill and if you missed the nets he would go chasing after it and we wouldn’t see him for 10 minutes but he would always come back with the ball.”
Will and Tyler’s father Alvaro played one season of high school lacrosse in his senior year and has supported his sons’ interests.
“My dad helped run the Amherst Youth Lacrosse program and he was really involved in my years playing,” Will said. “He was a volunteer and eventually he became the head of Amherst Youth Lacrosse and made a lot of cool changes. He’s been a really big influence and has always been there to support me.”
The brothers have shown great enthusiasm for sports and other activities outside of the lacrosse field as well. This past year Tyler organized a basketball recreational league available to any student in his high school.
“It’s just within our high school grades 9-12 and anybody can put together a team and the parents coach so it’s a lot of fun,” Tyler said.
Will plays in the school’s jazz band and intends to play in the band at UMass. Will, who will take a year off after graduating from high school, decided to pursue music rather than college athletics.
“I play trumpet and I’m in the jazz band and that means so much to me and I feel like that might take that away,” he said.
Tyler is taking a more open approach wit his future, but with a clear goal in mind.
“I want to do engineering and playing Division I sports and being successful in an engineering environment can be really difficult so I am trying to find the right school,” Tyler said. “So I am definitely going to play at the next level it just depends how everything works out.”
