Paige Hassen: JRN

Central Michigan senior Joel Drucker is a dual sport club athlete with hockey and lacrosse.

While Drucker has been playing hockey for over 15 years, lacrosse is a semi-new sport for him since he started in high school.

Drucker was recruited to CMU’s D2 hockey team. While it’s not an official sport through the university’s athletic department, they still have multiple coaches and a recruitment process. When some of the guys on the team found out about Drucker’s past with lacrosse, they asked him to join them as well.

Being a hockey goalie, Drucker has been well equipped with the skills of that playing position. When his high school friends tried to recruit him to play goalie for their lacrosse team, Drucker took one look at the lack of padding lacrosse goalies wear and knew it was not for him.

“I don’t want to play goalie. You’d have to be clinically insane to do that for lacrosse,” Drucker said. “Because, you know, they only have the chest protector, the gloves, and the helmet and that’s it. They’re not like a hockey goalie where they have the leg pads, the padded pants, the giant chest protector with the arms and stuff.”

It is roughly seven years later, and Drucker still loves to play both as much as he can.

Drucker is an education major graduating in May 2024. Right now, he is completing his student teaching at the Mount Pleasant High School working in the social studies department.

Being a dual sport athlete is one thing, but having practices for both of them during the same season is on a whole different level. Now, add student teaching for 7 hours a day on top of that, and then coaching. He also helps coach the Mount Pleasant High School’s team goalies.

When asked about burnout, Drucker had a unique take on it and believes he has only experienced it once.

“That’s the thing with the two sports; when one goes down, you still have the other.” Drucker said.

Drucker also believes that burnout for multiple sport athletes is different than the burnout for single sport athletes.

“If [single sport athletes] weren’t seeing the court, the field, the rink as much, they don’t have another sport to fall back on, to fill that void,” Drucker said.

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My experience:

I got very lucky to be able to work with Joel. To be a dual sport athlete in college, regardless of being a club sport, is a huge commitment. I’m just lucky he had enough time to meet with me. Honestly.

I am in a leadership scholarship program here at CMU, and there is a guy in my cohort who I knew played on the club lacrosse team. I asked him if he knew anyone that would be interested in a feature video or if he knew anyone with a cool story and he sent me straight to Joel. Within an hour of me reaching out, we already had an interview time set up.

I started this assignment pretty early because I knew spring break would be falling at an awkward time for assignments like these. All the footage for this feature was taken before spring break, so I was feeling good about what I had.

I do wish that I could have gotten more daily life videos to go along better with the story, but meeting three times with his busy schedule already… I couldn’t be too upset, so I made due with the time and footage I had.

The interview was hard to break down into about 2 minutes. I filmed two different shots, and each were about 15 minutes, so I had a lot to comb through. Since Joel is a two-sport athlete (and teacher and coach), there was a lot of information I had to choose from, while still trying to not dominate the entire video with interview.