After nearly 40 years of playing lacrosse, former Division II starter Ken Howell now finds his greatest joy not in actively being on the field, but in helping lead and guide his varsity and JV players into discovering theirs.
Howell’s lacrosse journey started in the second grade, when he moved to Maryland and, after watching a friend play, he decided that it was something he wanted to pursue as well. Growing up, Howell also played football, soccer, baseball, basketball and wrestled.
For Howell, sports had always had a huge impact on his life. His life was centered around sports with school and friends revolving around sports. Playing a sport every season and then getting into college and having lacrosse all season long, meant that Howell never really had any downtime.
“(Sports) really kept me focused, organized and on the ball,” Howell said. “I always wanted to go to college for sports. It kept a drive to do that.”
While still living in Maryland, Howell was being recruited by several Division I schools as just a Sophomore. During his junior year, Howell moved to Alabama, which had no lacrosse, making it much harder for them to find him at games, forced to go to camps in order to start getting recruited and noticed.
“(I went) to high school for two years at Severna Park High School in Maryland, and the last two years was called Chelsea High School,” Howell said. “The school in Maryland was much bigger with over 1000 students in just the High School. When I moved to Alabama, I think we had a graduating class with 100 students, so a much smaller school.”
After High School, Howell got recruited by a few Division III and Division II schools such as Limestone and Western Maryland Catawba. Howell then coached lacrosse at Jesuit Preperatory School for about eight years, when he stopped coaching and went to graduate school to get his Masters degree.
“I was originally wanting to be a coach when I got out of college,” Howell said. “But eight years into my career of coaching, I was still teaching at the time. I enjoyed being in the classroom, and I saw more of a vision of me being a teacher, being able to improve myself more as a teacher than as a coach. So my goals changed, and so that’s when I stopped coaching lacrosse.”
After getting his masters and returning to Jesuit, Howell decided he didn’t want to coach lacrosse anymore and, instead, switched to bowling which he coached at Jesuit for 10 years.
“The bowling coach had left, and we were friends,” Howell said. “She was the one who talked me into doing a bowling league with her, and so I was doing a bowling league just on the side for two years. And when she left, the owner of the bowling alley asked for me to be the coach, because he knew me and he knew I could bowl, and wanted me to start coaching after she left.”
For Howell, his love for coaching enables him to give back to other players, helping them develop even further.
