Not many students have the ability to play for a brand new team. For Northern Michigan University, this past spring was the school’s inaugural year for women’s lacrosse. Senior Ellie Bahr gets the opportunity to play for a very new team. Bahr committed on November 9 to play NCAA Division II lacrosse at Northern Michigan.

The team, mostly made up of students from the state of Michigan, has a unique chemistry. “The team never has a bad time; when I went for my overnight, we went to get ice cream and then went cliff jumping in Lake Superior,” Bahr said.

Bahr chose to go to Northern Michigan because it is big, public, and there are many amenities that the city and the campus have to offer. “I wanted to go to a school that had a hockey team and a football team to be able to go to events, [and] the city also has many activities like cliff jumping and hiking,” Bahr said.

Northern Michigan wasn’t the only school to offer Bahr scholarships for lacrosse. “There were two schools in Chicago, Aurora University, North Central, Grand Valley State, Concordia, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and a school in Baltimore,” Bahr said. Even though there were other schools that gave Bahr offers, she decided that Northern Michigan was the right fit for her.

While she committed to playing lacrosse in college, she also received offers to play hockey but over the last year she has lost interest in hockey. Over the summer Bahr spent her time playing lacrosse and working hard to improve, which was a part of making her decision to play lacrosse instead of hockey. “The lacrosse coaches had faith in me and knew that I could do something,” Bahr said.

The lacrosse program at BSM has worked wonders for Bahr. “The lacrosse program here is great, the coaches during practice make sure that the team is always working on something, being productive; [they] want to make you a better player, and will meet with me before games or after practice to help,” Bahr said.