An inside look into our patriot winter sports teams
Andre Garcia Feature/Q&A
Now that the fall season has ended for most of Northern’s fall sports we are moving on to the winter season. Many exciting sports such as wrestling, track, swimming and basketball have been starting up. Lets see how these sports compare to how they were last year and what the teams plan on doing this year to have an amazing season.
Indoor Track & field: Following a pretty good cross country season where the boys team made it to regionals and the girls team made it to states (Although Marcus Merritt and Jaxon Jacobs did individually quality) the cross country coaches return and plan on putting down better times on the track. Last year for indoor track a couple athletes such as Mya Summers, Caitlin Mullaney and Kayla Scott went to states. How does the new head coach Pete Dyro plan to improve this number and send more athletes to states? Well he says that he plans on giving his athletes a more hands off approach. Instead of forcing athletes to overwork themself his philosophy is “you get in what you put out”. Good luck to the patriot track team and hopefully this will be a great season for them.
Swimming: The Northern Swim team is kicking off a new season this year so here is some insight on how they plan to do things. To get a reference, last year many athletes made it to states and some athletes even won states such as Albert Zaidi and Carly Damon. One of the Swimming coaches commented “We had a great year… Both teams finished strong. Our Girls and Boys team both finished strong”. Now as far as this year goes the Swim team plans to practice hard as well as the coaches having high expectations for all of their athletes. The athletes seem to be doing good as well with them having good morale attending practice and supporting one another. Mrs Richards also stated “We had a really solid list of seniors that left us last year that we really missed but based on what we’ve seen just on our week of practice I think it’s going to be amazing”
Basketball: Coming into a new season the Northern basketball team is planning on doing some big things. So with that being said here is some insight on what the basketball team accomplished last year and also what there is to look forward too regarding their season. So as of last year the basketball coach says they did really well “We went to the second round of the playoffs”. Furthermore he said his athletes last year played tough and were well coached. Notable athletes last year included Alec Johnson and “Jeremiah Burn”. There were about 7 seniors that graduated last year as well. Moving forward the basketball coach plans on focusing on the fundamentals of Basketball because he has such a young roster to develop. Their plan on moving forward without the graduating seniors is to use the seniors that we have now to hopefully guide the young players to success.
Wrestling: Our last sport on this list but certainly not least is our Patriot wrestling team. A new winter season means a new start to the Northern wrestling team. Last year the wrestling team did “pretty good” as described by their coach. They had a decent record going 10-3, with a couple of athletes even going to states. Those state qualifying patriots being Ron Mooney and Jacob Gauf with even more going to regionals. The wrestling coach has big ambitions saying “Our goal is to win SMAC, win Regions, and win States. Anything else would be a disappointment”. Lastly, moving forward to replace the losses of the graduated seniors the new freshmen seem to be pretty good and the returning current seniors are going to guide them.