Williams School to eliminate three sports
New London — Armed with the intention of making its overall athletic program stronger, The Williams School confirmed Friday that it will eliminate three sports following the end of the school year.
Williams will no longer field teams in field hockey, squash or baseball, eliminating one sport from each season.
With an enrollment of approximately 250, including students from grades 6-12, Williams will still field two sports for each gender in the fall, winter and spring. Those sports are cross country and soccer in the fall, swimming and basketball in the winter and tennis, lacrosse and sailing in the spring.
"I love sports. The last thing I want to have happen is for people to think we hate sports," Head of School Mark Fader said from his office Friday morning. "The last thing I want people to think is we're diminishing the athletic program, just the opposite. We're trying to get better.
"The students have to do at least two activities for the school and we want to make sure what we're offering is formidable. ... What we're going to try to focus on is what the kids want, what's the best experience for these students. It's not an arbitrary decision."
Fader said while the ideal sports program at Williams would consist of middle school, junior varsity and varsity teams to accomodate the different age levels, such as the school has in basketball, some teams do not have adequate numbers for that.
For instance, the varsity baseball team has 13 players, including two eighth-graders. Last year the school tried to field a junior varsity team as well, with some players having to compete for both the JV and the varsity, what athletic director Bernadette Macca called "just not good for the kids."
Likewise, field hockey coach Eliza (Hannon) Smith, a member of the school's Class of 2006, has seen her program go from 60-plus when she was a player there to 18 last fall. Smith recalled her freshman season at Williams when there were 40 field hockey players just on the junior varsity team.
"As I said to my team at the end of the season, it's certainly sad, particularly for the girls that they're not going to be able to continue playing," Smith said. "But it's a decision that makes a lot of sense. We've really struggled numbers-wise; we had to go from varsity status to JV status a few years ago for one year.
"It's a smart decision. But you can see the emotional side."
Smith, also the varsity girls' basketball coach and junior varsity girls' lacrosse coach at Williams, said she has 27 girls on her lacrosse team alone.
Fader said the school's enrollment is split about 50-50 between boys and girls.
"Two-hundred and fifty kids, divide that in half. That's 125 boys. And (this spring) they can choose between tennis, lacrosse, baseball, the spring musical and you have some students who say, 'OK, I'm going to take the spring off.' OK, we're stretched too thin."
The baseball team marked its final season by taking a trip to Cooperstown, N.Y., this week. The Blues visited the National Baseball Hall of Fame and played a game Sunday against the Forman School at historic Doubleday Field.
Fader said the decision to eliminate sports came through careful thought by he and Macca, who has been keeping a spreadsheet of participation numbers for the past two years.
"It's definitely bittersweet," said Williams senior field hockey player Katie Hodgkinson of Mystic, who also plays basketball and lacrosse. "I love field hockey. I really found it sad it was going. But I completely understand."
v.fulkerson@theday.com
Twitter: @Vickieattheday
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