Freshmen excel in sports

Balancing Act
Freshman Robert Gragnola’s lifetime love of playing sports has led him to participate in three school sports.

“I play football, soccer and golf. I’ve been playing each of them since I was about 4 or 5 years old,” Gragnola said.
All year round Gragnola has several hours of practice every week.
According to Gragnola, football practice in the fall season lasted for three hours a day, and was even longer during game days. Soccer practice in the winter lasted for two and a half hours a day.
Gragnola started golf on Feb. 16, and he predicts that practice will last for around two hours regularly.
With the large number of practice and games that Gragnola has to attend, he finds it more challenging to finish his homework.
“Sometimes if I have a lot of homework it’s tougher to get it done because practice ends at 5:30 or 6:00 every day,” Gragnola said.
Hopefully Granola will continue with all three of his sports in the upcoming years of his high school career, and establish himself as a prominent athlete.

Making her mark in Color Guard

Freshman Rachel Menard is following in her older sister, junior Sarah Menard’s footsteps, and joined Color Guard at Redwood Middle School in sixth grade. After being involved in it for all of middle school, Menard chose to join Color Guard and Winter Guard.
“I joined Color Guard in sixth grade because I found out that Redwood was going to the inauguration and I wanted to be a part of it,” Menard said.
Menard devoted much time to Color Guard practice in the fall, and is currently dedicating her time to Winter Guard until the end of March.
“During field season, practice was about 20 hours a week, and Winter Guard [practice] is somewhere around 22 hours a week,” Menard said.
Although Menard is in her fourth year of doing Color guard, her fellow Color Guard members make the experience worthwhile.
“I enjoy the company in Color Guard as well as the activity and I wouldn’t be a part of Color Guard if I didn’t like the people,” Menard said.

Longtime swimmer challenges herself

After swimming competitively for five years until the start of high school, freshman Amanda Moriarty chose to involve herself in school athletics and join the water polo team and the swimming team.
“I took water polo [in the fall] and I am doing swimming right now,” said Moriarty.
Although Moriarty has five years’ worth of experience with swimming, she hadn’t played water polo before joining the school team, but was able to adapt to the sport and learn how to play.
Moriarty’s water polo practices and games may have taken up a large amount of her time, but by following the advice of upperclassmen water polo players, she was able to accommodate her schedule around her sport.
“It wasn’t difficult to balance my schedule around water polo because fellow team members helped me out with it,” Moriarty said.