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Cam Bomberry, here coaching the Iroquois Nationals, will join Barry Powless to lead the Wilkes-Barre Shamrocks.

Like most North American Lacrosse League teams, the Wilkes-Barre Shamrocks probably won’t have a ton of box lacrosse experience on their roster. But they’ll have plenty behind the bench. Wilkes-Barre will be announcing today that Barry Powless is their head coach heading into the league’s first season, which begins in January.

As a player, Powless has won the Mann Cup and the MILL Championship, been MVP of the Presidents Cup and played in the World Field Lacrosse Championships. As a coach, he led the Knighthawks to the final MILL title before the league became the NLL (1997) and has won a worlds silver medal as an assistant with the Iroquois Nationals.

He’s a member of the Ontario Lacrosse Hall of Fame and is part of one of the great lacrosse families the game has ever known. And while his college days at Syracuse were in the 70s, he won’t be out of touch with the game he’ll need to teach to today’s college grads. After all, he only retired from the Can Am Senior B league in 2007, at the age of 50.

He wasn’t a passenger on the Newtown Golden Eagles that year, either—he scored 48 points in 15 games and added 16 more in the playoffs.

Powless’ assistant has an equally impressive resume in the game. Cam Bomberry has also won the Mann Cup (twice with the legendary Six Nations Chiefs teams of the mid-1990s) and the pro title (playing for Powless on the ‘97 Rochester champs). He scored 444 points in a 12-year MSL career and added 148 in six MILL/NLL seasons.

Bomberry has been coaching with the Six Nations and Iroquois program since 1995 and has been on the staffs of both the Knighthawks and the Iroquois Nationals. His family is also one of the great lacrosse clans the game has known.

Even more than the sheer knowledge and experience the pair bring to the Shamrocks and NALL is their sense of the spirit of the game. As Powless said in a tremendous story from the 1992 Syracuse Herald-Journal, “My grandfather played. My uncles and my dad played. And I played in a lacrosse league as soon as I could walk.” Like many Native Americans, Powless believes in the spiritual essence of the game.

If he and Bomberry can infuse in their young charges even some of their passion and sense of reverence for playing the game the way it should be played, they will have a huge impact on the development of the Shamrocks and the NALL as a whole.

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