Los Alamos 12U lacrosse team wins Albuquerque championship

Los Alamos Youth Lacrosse’s 12U team brought home the championship trophy from Balloon Fiesta Park, beating a larger Albuquerque squad 9-6 on Saturday morning and capping a season that stretched across New Mexico and beyond.

The title came at the Albuquerque Lacrosse Fiesta, a boys and girls youth tournament that ran May 9-10 and included 10U, 12U and 14U divisions. For Los Alamos families, the result mattered because it showed a small-town program handling a regional bracket that drew teams from a bigger lacrosse market and still leaving with the top prize.

The Los Alamos team’s path to the championship included that 9-6 round-robin win over Albuquerque on May 9, a result that underscored how the local players had to earn the trophy against strong outside competition rather than cruise through a limited field. The tournament itself gave the win added weight: it was part of a broader annual event at Balloon Fiesta Park, not a standalone exhibition.

The championship also fit a larger pattern for Los Alamos Youth Lacrosse, which says its season generally runs from mid-March through May and sends teams to tournament weekends across New Mexico, southern Colorado and El Paso, Texas. The club says its purpose is to teach and promote lacrosse in a fun, safe, sportsmanlike environment, with an emphasis on skill development for players from third grade through eighth grade.

That approach has paid off in recent seasons. A Los Alamos Reporter item on April 28 said the club had already won a championship at a Santa Fe jamboree before finishing the year in Albuquerque, and a 2025 report showed another strong tournament run by local youth players. Taken together, those results suggest the county’s lacrosse pipeline is doing more than filling a schedule: it is producing teams that can compete, travel and win in regional play.

For a community where school and club sports help bind neighborhoods and grade levels together, the 12U title offered a clear marker of progress. It also gave younger players a concrete example of what a full season of practices, travel and teamwork can lead to, and it reinforced that Los Alamos can still stand out against larger-city competition when the bracket gets tight.