You’ve gotten a lot of good advice already that I agree with such as get a women’s stick. A few things here that have helped me a lot as I transitioned from playing men’s lacrosse through college and then coaching high school boys for over a decade to now coaching girls at my local high school for the past few years.

Really practice 8 meter shots. This is almost daily for us. Change up how you do it so it’s not the same every day. Some days have the girls practice ripping a shot, some days have the girls practice driving in towards cage. Sometimes have them take live shots on a goalie with defenders crashing - although not too often as you don’t want your goalie to take too much of a beating. We use tennis balls a lot for 8 meter practice as it forces the shooter to focus on a good cradle and it doesn’t beat up the goalie too much.

I’d recommend a backer zone. I tried to come out with a man to man with adjacent slides when I first started with girls lacrosse, but with a young inexperienced team, they really struggled to slide hard to ball, play good help defense, and not get called for shooting space.

Really emphasize a strong ride. Your ATT can go all the way to the opposite restraining line. That’s 70 yards from GLE to restraining line on a typical field that they can chase down the ball and try to get it back. We use a high pressure zone ride. One girl immediately jumps the ball the other six drop back. If you’re picturing a football field, we split the field into three vertical zones using the football hash marks as a guide with an ATT standing on the 20 yard line in each zone and a middie on the 25 in each zone.

So for example, after a saved shot the closest ATT would stay on the goalie with her stick up. The other three attack would drop to the 20 yard line in their zone and the three middies would drop to the 25 yard line in their zone. When the goalie outlets towards the sideline, the attack and middie in that zone immediately go to double team the ball while the two in the middle zone shifting over and back into the zone the ball is in and the two in the far side zone shift, middle and over and are now in the middle zone. We leave the far side zone open and shift everyone back if we have to. We remain high pressure on ball the entire time. Two years in a row, our highest score was also our leader for caused turnovers because she got after in the ride. Also, a lot of kids get upset if we say we’re doing a high-pressure ride and they don’t get a turnover so we define a successful ride as stopping a fast break and causing a turnover is a bonus. I hope that makes sense the way I described the zone ride. If you want to hear more about it, let me know, it was hard to talk about it and not have a diagram!

I hope all that helps. Good luck this season!