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Home > Articles > High School Sports > Athletes delighted to be back playing
Athletes delighted to be back playing
Posted: April 18th, 2013 @ 10:43pm
By CLAUDE SCILLEY
There's something special about opening day.
The memories are that much more vivid. "Last year it was against Regi," SaraJane Pratt said, without hesitation, "and it was pouring rain."
There's the promise of a fresh start. "This year," Hailey Bender said, "our goal is OFSAA."
It's the first glimpse of where a team may stand, with respect to the rest of the league. "It shows what we need to improve on, gives us an idea of what to expect," Pratt said, though after a 73-0 verdict over the Kingston Blues Thursday afternoon at Nixon Field, the shortcomings weren't necessarily all that apparent.
Unquestionably for the two final-year Napanee Golden Hawks, this year's opening day of the Kingston Area Secondary Schools Athletic Association rugby season carried an added delight - that it arrived at all.
"With it being our final year this is the last time we have a chance to bring a trophy home," Bender said, and they didn't want to miss it. They're thrilled that after withdrawing their services from extracurricular activities during the winter athletics season, teachers have returned to the sidelines.
With no scholastic sports during the winter, there was a lot of time spent wishing for sports to come back, said Pratt, who otherwise would have been playing hockey. That doesn't mean that the students at Napanee were idle. There was paperwork to do, and a quest to find alternate coaching, so the players would be ready if, indeed, there would be a season to play.
"There was a lot of pondering and planning," Pratt said.
That wasn't entirely new for the girls of Napanee, where there's a legacy of success to sustain and since the coach, Sean Dunleavy, teaches elsewhere.
"There's a whole bunch of returning players, senior players that help out," Pratt said. "With Sean teaching at a different school it's hard for him to get here sometimes, so when he gets here we're always ready."
There's a saying around the team, Bender said, that as you're leaving, you make sure there's a player moving up through the ranks who's as good as you, and she's left with the potential to become better.
"The team really takes all the younger players under our wings and teaches them as much as we know," Bender said. "Hopefully we can make them better than ourselves, to have a winning team for years to come."
School without sports the past three months was a different place, the girls agreed.
"I felt it," Pratt said. "I didn't really know what I wanted to do academically, so that's kind of why I came back, to play sports."
Bender was more succinct.
"Sports got me through high school," she said. "Without rugby and without basketball and everything else, I don't think I would have ever finished. Even if it's not sports (extracurriculars) make school a whole different experience."
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