{courtesy Sam Fisher}
Sam “Sammy” Fisher’s lacrosse career began in seventh grade with a borrowed jersey, a coach in need of a last-minute substitution, and a game at Pine Trails Park that would launch her on a history-making journey to Israel’s national lacrosse program.
Now the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School graduate is an Israeli citizen and a world championship medalist trying to help Israel reach the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Fisher, 23, grew up in Heron Bay and attended Westglades Middle School before graduating from Douglas in 2021. A three-time all-district honoree, two-time all-region and all-county selection, and a Miami Herald First Team All-County pick while at MSD, she helped lead the Eagles to three district titles in girls lacrosse.
She followed her standout high school career with four years of college lacrosse at Elon University in North Carolina. She now lives in Ashkelon, Israel, helping to grow lacrosse in a country where the hard-nosed sport, which draws on a player’s stick skills, field vision, speed, toughness, and lacrosse IQ, is catching on fast.
Fisher said her path to the international stage began almost by accident, as a seventh-grader.
“There was a big lacrosse tournament going on at Pine Trails Park, and I just happened to be there with my dad, just going to the park to hang out,” Fisher told Parkland Talk. “And a friend we knew, he was coaching one of the teams at the time, and his team was losing. And he saw me and said, ‘Can you just go throw on a jersey and just go run and score?’ I was like, ‘Okay, I have no idea what I’m doing.’ So I literally put on a jersey, picked up a stick for the first time, and just went on the field.”
{courtesy Sam Fisher}
It was the beginning of an unforgettable journey for Fisher, who went on to play for the Florida Select lacrosse team for about a year while also playing basketball, flag football, soccer, and track. She stepped away from lacrosse for a time until high school, where she played five sports in all, then returned to Florida Select and began playing for both the club program and MSD.
“From then I just stuck with lacrosse, and I realized that I had a future in lacrosse if I wanted to play in college,” she said.
By her junior year at Douglas, college coaches were watching.
Fisher said lacrosse recruiting rules allowed players to speak directly with college programs beginning Sept. 1 of their junior year. When midnight arrived, so did the emails.
“‘Come on a visit. We want to set up a phone call,’ all of this,” Fisher said. “But I knew that Elon was my dream school, my number one choice. So I was lucky enough to get an email from them at midnight, and I set up a call with the coach immediately. I went on a visit, and I committed.”
At Elon, Fisher became one of the program’s top players. But when her college career ended, she was nowhere near ready to put down her lacrosse stick.
{courtesy Sam Fisher}
Her path to Israel began in Poland in summer 2025, when she joined a festival team connected to Israel Lacrosse. International lacrosse festivals bring together teams from across the globe. The women’s tournament allowed Jewish athletes from the Diaspora to get involved with the program and represent Israel in a less formal setting.
“It was just an opportunity for me to get involved with Israel Lacrosse,” Fisher said.
The trip, she said, changed her life.
“I just fell in love with the people, the program, and everything about it,” Fisher said. “I had never been around that many Jewish athletes in my life. It was an incredible, eye-opening experience for me.”
At the end of the trip, Fisher said, Israel Lacrosse’s executive director asked her a question that changed her life: “Do you want to move to Israel and play for us?”
“And it was an immediate yes. It was the easiest answer ever,” she said.
Fisher made Aliyah, the process of becoming an Israeli citizen, and moved to Israel in November 2025.
She lives in Ashkelon, where Israel Lacrosse is headquartered, and trains at the organization’s national facility there. She made both Israel’s box lacrosse national team and field lacrosse national team, two versions of the sport that are very different.
Box lacrosse is played in a smaller, rink-style enclosed space, often surrounded by hockey-style walls, with heavier contact and more protective gear, while field lacrosse is played on a larger open field with more players, more running, and more room to develop plays.
“Box lacrosse is almost like women’s playing men’s lacrosse,” Fisher said. “We put all the pads on. We wear helmets. We play with men’s sticks. We play in what almost looks like a hockey rink, but with turf. And we hit. We push. Everything goes. There are minimal rules to how you can hit, and it is a mess; a fun, organized mess of lacrosse. It’s amazing, but completely different fundamentals, how you play, IQ, everything.”
Field lacrosse is the version Fisher grew up playing in Parkland and later played at Elon.
Her first major tournament with Israel came this summer at the inaugural women’s European Box Lacrosse Championships in Prague, where Israel won gold. Israel beat Germany 10-1 in the final.
“It’s the first time an Israel women’s team has ever won gold, so it was really cool to make history,” she said.
Fisher, whose family still lives in Parkland, said the title came with a deeper meaning.
“It was also my first national team with Israel, and I really can’t put into words how grateful I am to be able to represent a country that I have such a deep connection to.”
{courtesy Sam Fisher}
The team’s next big challenge came in Tokyo, where they won bronze at the Nissin Foods 2026 World Lacrosse Women’s Championship, defeating the Haudenosaunee team 7-4 in the bronze medal game on August 2. The ancestors of the Haudenosaunee, also historically known as the Iroquois, invented lacrosse and call it the Creator’s Game.
Fisher scored three goals in the game and was named player of the match, according to World Lacrosse.
For Israel, it was a historic result.
“We won bronze, which is the best an Israel team sport has ever done, and the best an Israel women’s lacrosse team has ever done,” Fisher said. “So we made history for the entire country and Israel Lacrosse, which is really cool.”
Much of Israel Lacrosse’s current strength comes from Jewish athletes abroad who move to Israel, become citizens, and help build the game inside the country.
“The sport isn’t that big here yet, but that is our job in [the]country,” Fisher said. “That’s why I moved here, and that’s why I work to grow the sport and get more youth players to play here and learn about lacrosse, and then grow up and be on national teams like I am.”
She credited Israel Lacrosse founder Scott Neiss and executive director Ian Kadish with helping build the program.
“He is doing a fabulous job growing the sport in the country and in the states as well,” Fisher said of Kadish. “And I think having so much pride for this country has really allowed us to excel and get so many talented players to represent us.”
Part of Fisher’s work in Israel involves school visits, where players introduce lacrosse to Israeli students who may have never seen the sport played before.
“We go into schools and teach them lacrosse during their PE classes,” Fisher said. “And if they like it, and if we think they’re good, we’ll ask them to come to practice. And a lot of the time they will. So it’s kind of us going out and almost recruiting people to come, and they tell their friends, and their friends come, and they tell their friends. So it’s kind of this cool trickle-down effect all the way down the line.”
Fisher said lacrosse appealed to her partly because it felt like a combination of several sports she loved.
“Growing up I played flag football and basketball, and I ran track,” she said. “All of these sports kind of mesh into one with lacrosse. I think it really just gave me an opportunity to continue playing all the sports I love in one.”
But lacrosse, she said, is not a sport an athlete can master using any one skill alone.
“It’s a sport that you can rely heavily on athleticism up to a certain point,” she said. “But if you don’t have good stick work, you can’t play. You can be the fastest kid out there, you can be the most athletic kid, but if you don’t have the fundamentals down, you won’t have great success. So it’s really cool that if you put in the hard work and actually focus on IQ and fundamentals and your stick work, you will actually have success, rather than just conditioning and lifting [weights] and [studying] film.”
At Elon, Fisher played attack, an offensive position. She also worked on the draw, which she compared to a basketball tipoff or a hockey faceoff.
With Israel, she has moved to midfield, which requires her to play both offense and defense.
“It was definitely tough for me, because I hadn’t played defense in so long,” Fisher said. “So getting the footwork back, having to guard someone and follow their footwork was definitely a struggle for me at first, but it almost felt like muscle memory. When I got back into training for defense, it just all came back to me.”
Her conditioning regimen changed, too, with Fisher “focusing less on short sprints and bursts, and rather the whole field distance and long distance, and being able to sprint, but then slow down and run the whole length of the field.”
Fisher said she has been fortunate to avoid major injuries, though a stress fracture in her foot kept her out for a fall season at Elon.
The harder test, she said, has sometimes come from the stands.
Asked what adversity Israel’s team had to overcome during their recent tournaments, Fisher named the scourge of anti-Jewish bigotry that has targeted Jews around the world since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, and ensuing Israel-Hamas war.
“What comes to mind immediately is the antisemitism that we face, and it’s unfortunately a real thing that all Israel teams go through,” Fisher said. “But you don’t think it’s real until it actually happens.”
During the tournament in Prague, she said, “people could not have been more against us.”
“But hearing the chanting in the stands against us, and screaming at us and calling us names, it almost makes you want to fight harder. To have the attitude, ‘I don’t care what you’re saying. Say it louder. It doesn’t faze me.’ And we just all came together as a team and said, ‘Don’t listen to them. This is our game. Let’s go make history.’ And it’s just a bigger motivator for us.”
Fisher said that when spectators direct derogatory comments and hate at the team, “We just use it as motivation.”
The team’s next big tournament, the world championships in Tokyo, felt very different.
“Tokyo was amazing for us,” Fisher said. “We didn’t really face any hate.”
As Israel advanced deeper into the tournament, Fisher said something unusual happened: teams Israel had beaten began cheering for them.
“That has never happened before, and it was really, really cool to have different fans and other countries cheer for us,” Fisher said. “We felt like, ‘wow, we are actually starting to make a difference’ by representing Israel on the world stage.”
“It’s more than just lacrosse at that point,” she added.
For Fisher, representing Israel has become a statement of pride at a time when Jews around the world have faced open discrimination and prejudice.
“It really has been the greatest honor to represent Israel and be proud, and not be afraid to wear Israel across my chest, to wear my Star of David in different countries,” Fisher said. “And it really is empowering to see the Israeli kids that I coach and I work with just be so resilient and so strong with everything they’ve been through, and to still have pride and to not be scared of anyone disrespecting them.”
Living in Israel, she said, has changed the way she carries herself when she returns to the U.S.
“Living with them now, I take that feeling back when I go home,” Fisher said. “I wear my Star of David and my Israel Lacrosse shirt, and if someone has something to say to me, go for it. I don’t care because I have so much pride for my country.”
Her message to Jewish kids and adults facing bigotry is an inspiring one.
“I would tell every young Jewish athlete and Jewish person out there to have pride,” Fisher said. “If we keep having pride, people will eventually stop worrying about us and respect us, the way that we respect others. So I say, just have more pride and more respect for yourself, and do not be afraid.”
Next, Fisher will embark on a journey she hopes will end with Olympic gold for her and the Israeli team.
Lacrosse will return to the Olympics in 2028 in Los Angeles, with only six national women’s teams able to qualify.
“We’re hoping to be one of them,” Fisher said.
The first step is the European Sixes Lacrosse Championships, scheduled for November in Spain. Fisher said Israel Lacrosse is holding tryouts for the team, and she has already advanced.
“The second round of tryouts will be September,” she said. “Hopefully, after that, I’ll make the team and compete in the European Championships in November.”
For Fisher, lacrosse will continue to be about more than just athletics.
It’s a chance to keep carrying Israel, and Jewish pride, onto the field.
“It really has been the greatest honor to wear white and blue on an international stage,” she said.
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