He isn’t just a multi-sport athlete.
Lancaster’s Connor Carrow plays both varsity hockey and lacrosse, but the junior is also the Lancaster student union president elect. Carrow handles his demanding schedule with poise and maturity.
“In seventh grade, I was involved in student council,” Carrow explained. “I was middle school president in eighth grade, and I was on a committee with the superintendent and high schoolers, and I met the president at the time. His name was Alec Blunt, and he seemed like a 30-year-old man to me. It was just kind of like, ‘Wow, that guy is mature. I want to be like that when I’m in high school.'”
Carrow’s sports career began well before that. He began playing hockey at age 5, and current Lancaster lacrosse coach Dave Mazur and his son Ben invited Carrow to play lacrosse when he was 7.
“Hockey was just kinda something that I decided to pick up on my own,” Carrow said. “And then lacrosse — Coach Mazur’s actually a family friend, and Ben was into it, so I was invited through him, and I knew it was similar to hockey, so I just kind of decided, ‘Why not?’ and stuck with it all the way, kind of fell in love with it.”
Hockey is Carrow’s favorite sport, but lacrosse is a close second, and he has a unique love for each sport and its brand of intensity. In hockey, Carrow is a forward; in lacrosse, he’s a midfielder who spends a lot of time at the faceoff X.
“Hockey’s different than any other sport,” Carrow said. “It’s a whole different game on the ice; I just kind of feel different than I do in anything outside of the ice, so it’s just kind of a different feeling and kind of a whole other world on the ice, so I love it. Lacrosse is a very personal sport, especially taking faceoffs; it becomes a personal battle of pride when you’re at the X with another guy, and I love that and I live for that one-on-one, just kind of battle it out and just put everything I have on the line.”
Carrow described lacrosse as a game of personal pride; hockey is a puzzle that can be solved through teamwork.
“Hockey is a lot more of one team against another team, and I think lacrosse had a tendency to become more individual matchups,” Carrow explained. “And I think lacrosse is a bit more of a test of your pride and grit, where hockey can be more of, kind of a puzzle, where you have to work as a team to figure out where the kinks in the other team are.”
Carrow described this past hockey season as a wakeup call for his confidence. He spent his sophomore season seeing limited playing time for the Legends, but as a junior, Carrow scored his first goal of the season in the first game of the season. The opponent was St. Joe’s, which finished the year as the No. 1 ranked team in the state.
“Last year, being a sophomore on the Fed team, I didn’t play much, which is the way it is and you kind of learn the ropes as you go,” Carrow said. “And this year, our first game, I scored my first goal against Joe’s, and that ended up on the news the next day. That was kind of a wakeup — I need to be more confident out there, and it just kind of opened me up to, you know, I can compete with the big dogs and just kind of be more confident and keep working, and I’ll get there one day.”
The hockey team’s season ended with a 1-0 double overtime loss to rival Clarence.
Lacrosse season gave Lancaster redemption. After losing both regular season matchups to Clarence, the Legends defeated Clarence at Clarence’s home field to advance to the Section VI Class A finals for the first time in the program’s history.
Although they were defeated soundly by Class A powerhouse Orchard Park, the Legends were in good spirits after the game, and Carrow believes that the best is yet to come.
“It was an amazing experience,” Carrow said just minutes after the season ended. “Our program is growing. Mr. Malecki — Ken Malecki — was huge and he started growing that, and now Coach Dave coming in as coach, our program is definitely on the rise. This is the first time, definitely not the last, that we’re gonna see OP here. And hopefully we’ve got it the next few years. We’ve got a great underclass, and hopefully we got ’em.”
Playing both sports helps Carrow to be a well-rounded athlete.
“It forces me to use different skill sets, whether it’s just a lot of leg strength — you do that in hockey, where it’s more cardio and stuff in lacrosse,” he explained. “I think it’s just kind of a whole well-rounded thing, make sure that all aspects of my body are being worked at all times throughout the year.”
Speaking of being well-rounded, Carrow strives to be not just a well-rounded athlete but also a well-rounded individual, and his involvement in student government as well as several other clubs and extracurricular activities does just that. From that day in eighth grade, Carrow knew that he wanted to be that mature leader that he saw in the current president.
“I want to be someone that people meet and are like, ‘Oh my god, he’s in high school,'” Carrow explained. “I want to be a leader in my class and kind of in everything that I do, so it’s just kind of been a personal goal for me since the beginning.”
In the Section VI finals at All High Stadium on June 2, a player for each team was chosen as a character athlete of the game. It was no surprise that Carrow was chosen as Lancaster’s representative, even among a team of mature young student athletes.
In everything he does, Carrow is conscious of the impression he makes on others, and he saw the award as both an honor and a responsibility.
“Being a leader in a lot of different aspects, it’s very cool in a sense, but it’s also a responsibility,” Carrow said. “And you have people that are looking at you all the time, not necessarily looking up to you, but scrutinizing everything that you do. All that kind of forces me to make sure that no matter what I’m doing or how into a game I get or how into anything that I get, I have to make sure that I’m always, not putting on an act, but I’m always putting my best foot forward and making sure that I’m setting a good example for people around me because people are looking.”
Connor Carrow at a National Leadership Conference in Washington, DC in January 2016.
As he looks ahead to next year and what his senior year will bring, Carrow has high hopes for each of the teams he’ll be involved in and responsibilities he’ll carry. Hockey is no different, with Carrow and a few other key players returning, as well as some potential new faces.
“Word on the street is that we have a few guys coming in that were playing travel next year, so I think we’ve got some good looks,” Carrow said. “We’ve got a lot of returning guys — [Shawn] Kross, [Jeff] Coons, and all those guys, so I think we definitely have a solid look for next year. I think we have a good shot at it. Once you get into playoffs, it’s anyone’s game, so I think we’ve definitely got it.
“That’s solid right there.”