Like so many young athletes in Walden, 12 year-old Oliver Brunetti is most at ease with a stick in his hands.

Like so few of the young athletes in Walden, the stick of choice for the grade 7 student at St Benedict Catholic Secondary School is the one used to play lacrosse.

"My friends were all talking about it," said Brunetti, thinking back to his first attempts at cradling and passing and shooting with the webbed apparel in his possession back in 2022.

"They had played previous years and they were talking about how it helps with hockey."

"After my third year, I started to realize that I am not too bad at this. I started to train for it and realized that I could actually go somewhere with lacrosse."

In this case of Oliver Brunetti and his father, Jon, that last utterance is a whopping understatement.

For most of the nearly full calendar year since he cracked the Toronto Rock Stars roster based out of Oakville, their weekly schedule would involve a trip on Thursday nights to the shores of Lake Ontario, returning home that night and doing it all over again less than 24 hours later in order to spend the weekend bouncing from Erin to Stoney Creek and on to Georgetown or the like.

The experience availed the youngster, who now has four years of Sudbury Rockhounds box lacrosse game play under his belt, to all forms and variations of the sport - a key offering given that post-secondary leagues on both sides of the border feature only the field lacrosse edition.

"There's a thing called sixes; it's kind of the rules of both (box and field lacrosse) mixed together," said Brunetti. From September until November, that is the training mode of choice for he and his crew, a team that is based largely around a core of talent from the Burlington area, with two young prospects from Huntsville one from Barrie also joining the Nickel City lad.

Workouts then shift to the indoor box game, with April signalling the inclusion of some field hockey outings to go along with his Rockhounds' box schedule. All in all, it makes for a very busy year, but one which is allowing Brunetti to fine-tune various aspects of his game, most notably on the offensive side of the ball.

"Someone will set a pick for me and I either take a shot or look for someone who is open," Brunetti explained, outlining a standard set play in the attacking zone. "You just kind of get the feel of where people are going to be after playing with them for a long time."

"I don't really know how to explain it."

The extent to which the youngest of two children in the family (Oliver has an older sister who is a figure skater) can deep dive into the highly specific details of the game can be fascinating.

"It's weird to say but I found that a lot of my belief that I could go somewhere was based on my faceoffs," said Brunetti. "Faceoffs in lacrosse are way different than hockey. Some guys get to the NLL (National Lacrosse League) just for their faceoff skills."

"FOGOs," he stressed. "Face Off, Get Off".

"I was doing very well at faceoffs and I think after that, everything started to click: my sense for lacrosse, my speed, everything."

Despite his hectic schedule, Brunetti was able to wedge in some school participation with floor hockey, basketball, track and field and cross country.

But it is his commitment to lacrosse that is beginning to really pay dividends, named to the Team Ontario field lacrosse roster last year.

"But I still like box lacrosse more," he noted with a smile.