“All right!” Kevin Cousins yelled from the sidelines of his daughter Maura’s junior varsity lacrosse game at Dexter High School , applauding the referee’s decision to disallow a Skyline goal.

“She ran straight through the goal circle,” Cousins said, repeating the referee's explanation of the call exactly. “Whatever that means.”

Cousins, like many Dexter players and parents, is learning the sport of lacrosse as he goes along with the Dreadnaughts' inaugural year as a varsity program.

Unlike the boys program that preceded it with its first varsity season last year, the girls program did not have any club presence before becoming varsity this season.

But when Brian Callanan interviewed for the position of varsity boys coach last season, he not only laid out goals for the boys program, but one for girls as well.

Doing so was demanded of him in order to comply with Title IX, though Callanan said compliance with the law wasn’t his only motivation for adding a girls team.

“Just being around lacrosse the number of years I have been, having started girls programs in the past, I know we wanted to maximize the culture here and include the girls in the lacrosse plans here in Dexter,” said Callanan, who coached for 22 years in New Jersey and New York prior to moving to Dexter. “We put a clinic on in the fall, we had enough interest and we moved forward.”

Callanan hoped that 20 girls would come out, enough to field one team. Thirty one did, enough for a varsity and JV squad. With just five seniors, Callanan is encouraged by the initial interest.

“We’re bringing back the vast majority of them and hopefully we’ll be infused with some freshmen next year," said Callanan, who's like to add a freshman team.

Coaching the girls varsity team is Amelia Maturo, whose last name is a familiar one in local lacrosse circles. Amelia’s father, Ray Maturo, started the Ann Arbor Women’s Lacrosse Club and the girls program at Huron High School. Amelia played college lacrosse at Smith College and Michigan.

Dexter is the third high school in Washtenaw County to add girls lacrosse as a varsity sport in as many years, doubling the number of teams in the area since 2008.

Like the other five teams in the county, the lacrosse team draws the majority of its players from the field hockey rosters. Field hockey also became a varsity sport at Dexter this past fall after years of being associated with the Washtenaw Whippets, a co-op team comprised of athletes from Manchester, Chelsea and formerly Saline. There are also some former soccer and softball players on the team.

“I’ll take anyone we can get,” said Maturo.

“It’s a lot of fun, I like it even more than field hockey,” said senior team member Leah Diestel, who didn’t used to play a school sport in the spring. “A lot of people can score more and there’s a lot of action.”

Pete Cunningham covers sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at petercunningham@annarbor.com or by phone at 734-623-2561. Follow him on Twitter @petcunningham.