Thank you!
Your support is sustaining the future of local news in our communities.

Region One girls lacrosse and softball start season with full squads

FALLS VILLAGE — Girls lacrosse and softball both have an unusually large number of players this spring at Housatonic Valley Regional High School.

The spring sports season began on April 4.

There are 25 freshman girls playing a spring sport, a sharp increase from the 15 from a year prior.

“The classes that are coming in, both the sophomore and freshman class, have large numbers of female athletes. We saw this in basketball, we saw it in soccer,” said Region One Athletic Director Anne MacNeil. “It’s also thanks to the upperclassmen talking up the sports, which really makes a difference too, particularly with girls lacrosse.”

Over the past two years, the girls lacrosse team has had unpredictable seasons. In 2020, the season was canceled due to COVID-19, and in 2021, the team could only schedule five games due to more COVID-related complications.

This spring, with a normal season ahead, the girls lacrosse will have a roster of 26 players, the most the team has had in recent years and almost double the 15 athletes on the team last year.

“Just having [substitutions] is such a luxury. It’s going to allow the more experienced players to take breaks if they need to, and that’s a luxury we didn’t have last year,” said Head Coach Laura Bushey. “Also, the new players are incredibly skilled. It’s a really athletically skilled group.”

For lacrosse, there is a lack of “feeder programs” — youth leagues where athletes can learn and play the sport before entering high school.

Absent prior experience, the high school teams have to focus on the sport’s fundamentals before moving on to more specialized skills development.

With the arrival of a large group of underclass athletes — in this case 11 freshmen — the team will have a core group to develop over the coming years.

“I literally only have only two girls on the team that played when they were young. All the others started as freshmen or sophomores. That’s wonderful and also challenging because teams that we play against, like Watertown, have a huge feeder program,” said Bushey. “To me, that’s one thing I find so fun about [coaching,] watching them learn from the very very beginning, but it also makes it challenging.”

For softball, the total roster size grew from 27 members last year to 28 this year. However, like lacrosse, the majority of this year’s team is underclassmen — nine freshmen and six sophomores. Peter Foley, who can usually be found on the basketball and baseball benches as an assistant coach, took over this season while Head Coach Kaleigh Selino is on maternity leave.

“[With a large freshman and sophomore class] it’s good to have senior-led leadership show the girls how  to act and how to play and how to get ready for games,” said Foley.  “It’s good for the [underclassmen] to see, so in the future you know how to build.”

Both lacrosse and softball played on opening day, April 4. Lacrosse started its season on the road, playing Notre Dame Catholic High School in Fairfield.  The team’s home opener comes on Friday, April 15, against Watertown High School.

The softball team opened the season at home against Thomaston High School.

Hunter O. Lyle

Latest News

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

Cornwall Historical Society celebrates Connecticut’s Black patriots

On Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Cornwall Historical Society, author and genealogist John Mills will breathe new life into the stories of some of Connecticut’s more underappreciated patriots. The reason these heroes were forgotten? They were Black.

At a time when white colonists were fighting for their own liberty and political independence, many Black men who fought alongside them remained enslaved. Some risked their lives only to return to bondage. Though enslaved people were promised freedom from both sides of the Revolutionary War in exchange for their service, Great Britain, too, was still deeply dependent on slavery. For Black people in America, the war presented both extraordinary risks and uncertain paths to the freedom that white colonists were demanding for themselves.

Keep ReadingShow less
education

A sanctuary for second chances

A sanctuary for second chances

Stephanie Saetta runs Charlie Chicken Bones, a sanctuary in Salisbury.

Madi Long
You only get one or two of these soul connection dogs, so I do this in his honor.
— Stephanie Saetta

Stephanie Saetta has spent much of her life caring for others. A physician at White Plains Hospital, she has another calling at home in Salisbury — one that has four legs and a wagging tail. She runs Charlie Chicken Bone Sanctuary, a nonprofit dog rescue that brings dogs from overcrowded pounds and the streets of Texas to foster homes in northwestern Connecticut, where they can begin again.

The sanctuary is named for Charlie, the dog who taught her how special a bond between a person and rescue animal can be.

Keep ReadingShow less
our community

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Big ideas come to Lenox for inaugural field festival

Hunter Runnette, founder and board chair of field, has spent years fostering arts and cultural programming in the Berkshires.

Provided

What do joy, gardening, artificial intelligence, the American experiment and the creative process have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out, at least when some of the world’s most compelling thinkers get together to talk about them.

From Friday, Oct. 23, through Sunday, Oct. 25, Lenox, Massachusetts, will host the inaugural field festival, a three-day gathering of writers, artists, scholars and cultural figures at Shakespeare & Company. Billed as a festival of ideas, entertainment, learning and discovery, field brings together an impressive roster of voices to explore everything from the deeply personal to the profoundly political.

Keep ReadingShow less
community
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.

The Pink House AM is serving up community

The Pink House AM is serving up community

Mare Rubin and Maggie Levine of the Pink House AM.

Madi Long

It all started with a yoga class. Mare Rubin was working on her second act after leaving the Upper West Side, where she’d raised a family and worked in corporate marketing. Newly empty nesters, she and her husband decided to move to the wilds of northwestern Connecticut, where they had spent 15 years as weekenders, to see what life in the woods had in store for them.

Rubin started teaching yoga classes at the Union in West Cornwall, a space designated by the town of Cornwall as a community hub with couches, Wi-Fi, occasional events and a growing yoga class schedule. She was adjusting well but missed one important thing about city life: a casual coffee shop.

Keep ReadingShow less
business

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

Sons of Astro are musicians, friends and bandmates — in that order

The Sons of Astro will be at the Common Pub in Housatonic on Oct. 24 and the 2nd Home Lounge in Winsted on Nov. 14.

Provided

No matter where they are in the world, musicians seem to find other musicians. There’s a shared language, a shared experience of being on stage and performing, and a shared enthusiasm for making those melodies by themselves or together. Such is the case with Norfolk and Brooklyn-based cosmic Americana band Sons of Astro.

That magnetic musicians’ bond drew Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mike Cobb into the orbit of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Matt Statler. The two neighbors took to each other right away and were soon playing open mics together. As an ethics professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Statler made the case that if he sat in for Cobb’s set and Cobb sat in for Statler’s, they could play together and double their stage time. Clearly, these men wanted to make as much music as possible. That became a little harder when Cobb and his family moved up to Norfolk, Connecticut.

Keep ReadingShow less
concerts

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

One more weekend to get inside the art at ArtEast

The participating artists in this year’s ArtEast open studios.

Provided

ArtEast’s annual October Open Studio Tour is already underway, but there’s still one more weekend to step inside the creative worlds of artists working throughout eastern Dutchess County. On Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 24 and 25, artists will once again open their studio doors, inviting visitors to see where the work happens, meet the people who make it and perhaps discover something worth taking home.

Now in its 21st year, the ArtEast October Open Studio Tour offers a self-guided journey with participating studios in Holmes, LaGrangeville, Hopewell Junction, Pawling, Patterson, Poughquag and Wingdale. Visitors can explore painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media and other artistic practices, and get some leaf-peeping in at the same time.

Keep ReadingShow less
open-studio
google preferred source

Want more of our stories on Google? Click here to make us a Preferred Source.