At Housatonic Valley Regional High School, winter brings packed bleachers, ecstatic student sections, and distinctive energy for basketball season. The team culture and overall energy result in a large turnout at the home games. But beyond basketball, other winter athletes endure long practices and tough competitions — often with far less recognition.
While basketball tends to draw large crowds and headlines, sports like swim, ski, indoor track, and hockey compete in front of much smaller audiences. Other than the students directly involved, many people in the school community are unaware of when these teams compete, who their standout athletes are, and how they perform throughout the season.
Part of the difference in involvement comes down to location and the nature of the sports themselves. “It’s much easier to walk into the gym than it is to walk onto a ski course,” athletic director Anne MacNeil said. Basketball is a team oriented sport played in the school gym, making attendance easy. New traditions like rival night and themed games also increase excitement. MacNeil explained that when the ice hockey team used to compete at Hotchkiss, the games were widely attended. Many winter sports are also more individual based, making it harder to build hype around one race or run than a team competition.
Beyond the challenge of drawing spectators, the teams themselves are also limited in size. Housatonic’s small enrollment contributes to smaller rosters, especially in nontraditional sports. Cost and access also make some winter sports harder for students to become involved with. “You have to be introduced to skiing. You have to be introduced to hockey,” MacNeil said. “If you look at what it takes to play those sports, there’s a money factor involved.”
For the swim team, the difference in team culture is notable. Senior Katie Crane played basketball her freshman year before fully committing to the swim team. “When I played basketball, we weren’t just showing up for our team, we were showing up for the student section too,” she said. “For swim, what fueled our energy was just the team itself.”
Riley Klein
Swim meets rarely draw big crowds, but some competitors said that reduced the pressure. “I love swim because there isn’t that competitiveness and pressure,” Crane said. “I just showed up and I would race, but I was racing for myself.” Swimmers said their teammates and coaches were supportive, even if a big audience wasn’t there to cheer them on.
The lack of visibility can also be frustrating. “It definitely feels like I put up big performances without it getting noticed because I made Berkshire League first team and no one knows,” freshman Phoebe Conklin said. “For basketball and soccer, it’s this huge deal when you make first team.”
The ski team faces similar struggles. “It’s actually a fun spectator sport,” said junior Danny Lesch. Because races are largely individual, standout performances don’t always translate into team wins, even though the team has many accomplished athletes. Lesch said the individual athletes then get less recognition despite high levels of personal success. “What a lot of people don’t realize is that probably the most successful students we have at their sport have been our best skiers,” Lesch said.
dWinter Cheney sports three gold medals after a victorious performance in the Berkshire Hills Ski League championships Wednesday, Feb. 18.
Despite the recognition gap between basketball and other winter sports, athletes and community members have recently made larger efforts to improve visibility. “That’s always been an area that I have struggled to do better in,” MacNeil said. “In the last two years, I’ve really focused on our Instagram account and trying to spotlight people.” While trying her best to equally represent each sport, MacNeil also relies on athletes themselves to send photos and stats. “I can’t be everywhere at once,” she said.
Looking ahead, the future of other sports at Housatonic may depend on overcoming challenges tied to the school’s small enrollment. “I just had to cancel girls’ lacrosse,” MacNeil said. Increasing visibility and community support can help keep teams active and competitive. Greater recognition can help spark student interest, increasing participation and reminding the community that success exists across sports with less publicity. For members of the ski team, even small efforts can help make a difference. “What we hope for is one of the races next year, we get a crowd, get people to come, just one race,” Lesch said.
KK Kozik in her studio
It is a particularly fitting philosophy for an artist whose paintings often begin with the world around her but rarely end there. There might be something recognizable — a stone wall, an apple tree, a crow — but then there is something less certain. Something that appears to be one thing becomes another upon inspection. Memory gets involved. So does imagination. So does time.
Since moving from New York City to Sharon, Connecticut in 2006, the landscape around her has become increasingly important to that process.
“I just saw things differently,” Kozik said.
The change was not immediate. She remembers an earlier version of herself driving through Vermont without paying much attention to what was happening beyond the windshield.
“I didn’t have the means to see what was happening around me,” she said. “I just sort of la, la, la, la, la, driving to Vermont.”
But, she said, she started to pay attention differently.
“I became more sensitized as time went on,” she said.
Asked whether that change came with age, she said, “Age and so-called wisdom.”
There’s a sense of loss in her landscapes, but a particular kind of loss that also has a twinge of redemption. Specifically, what happens to a landscape when people leave it?
“When the people go away, the wildlife comes back,” Kozik said.
KK Kozik in her studio with her painting “Golden Delicious.”Natalia Zukerman
Kozik’s work has never settled into a single recognizable formula. She has painted landscapes, figures and still lifes, moved toward abstraction and returned to representation. Her subjects change, but the underlying impulse remains: to take what is in front of her and discover what else there might be.
Kozik describes herself as someone who is always trying to figure things out. Her paintings often have the feeling of a thought in progress rather than a conclusion. They have been called “single-line novellas,” a description that makes sense: They can contain the suggestion of an entire story without telling you exactly what happened.
The animals are part of that storytelling.
They arrived partly because of what was disappearing.
“They were like the new redemption in a way,” she said.
There is something almost funny about the way Kozik talks about this — not because the loss itself is funny, but because she refuses to turn it into a grand pronouncement. She observes something, considers it, and lets it complicate the work.
That same sensibility comes through when she talks about her own development as an artist. Her paintings make room for interpretation. They don’t always tell the viewer what an animal symbolizes, or why a landscape has been altered, or where a particular image came from. Instead, they leave enough evidence to make you curious and enough room for your own stories.
The effect is not accidental. Kozik has spent years thinking about how images work, both as paintings and as containers for ideas.
Her work is currently included in “The Naturalist,” a group exhibition on view through Sept. 13 at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, alongside Richard Klein, Sally Maca, Rick Shaefer and Tricia Wright. The exhibition brings together artists whose work engages with the natural world, including its forms, histories and mysteries.
Kozik is an especially apt fit for the exhibition. She is described by the gallery as a landscape painter, figurative painter and interiors/still-life painter whose work frequently moves toward painterly abstraction. Her practice, the gallery notes, is “fluid and continuous” — always searching for new pictorial problems to solve.
That search has also extended beyond her own studio.
For several years, Kozik ran ICEHOUSE Project Space, an 18th-century icehouse on Sharon’s town green that she transformed into an unusual venue for contemporary art. It opened in 2018 with Dan Devine’s “Inside-Out NASCAR” and went on to host site-specific projects by artists including Mark Dion, Eric Aho, Janet Biggs, Richard Klein, Kristin Jones, Lisa Hoke and Ryan Frank. The projects addressed everything from the decline of winged insects and native and invasive plants to Sharon’s iron industry, its gardens and its history as an ice-producing community.
The space is now closed, but its premise still feels connected to Kozik’s painting practice. Each project responded in some way to the physical location, turning what might otherwise have been a little historic outbuilding into a setting for contemporary art.
Kozik’s own work does something similar with the landscape. She takes a place and lets it become more than a place.
Kozik’s paintings tell us that something happened before we arrived, and that something will happen after we leave.
And then there is the question of what to do with the space in between.
Maybe Kozik’s paintings are less about that space and more about an idea, as she put it, of “which questions to think about.”
Jazzmine Bone and A Stitch in Tyme power through the Gambler’s Choice run during the 2024 Lakeville Open.
The event, which has been held continuously for 69 years, is open to the public with free admission.
Individual competitions will run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and visitors can stop by briefly or settle in for the day.
A food truck, bake sale and portable restrooms will be available on-site.
The show is the primary fundraiser for The Lakeville Pony Club, with proceeds supporting young riders who need financial assistance to participate in lessons. Members and their families work throughout the year to create the event for both competitors and spectators.
Members of the Lakeville Pony Club and Echo the pony arrive for the costume class during the Lakeville Open in 2024.Caitlin Von Graf
For those new to horse shows, the day offers a chance to learn more about the sport and understand what happens in the ring. In equitation competitions, judges evaluate the rider’s skill, from beginners learning walk and trot to more advanced riders navigating cantering and jumping courses.
Hunter competitions focus on the horse’s style and smoothness over fences, while jumper classes emphasize accuracy and speed as horses and riders race against the clock without knocking down rails.
The day also includes a crowd favorite: the costume class, where horses and riders dress up in creative ensembles for a chance at the top prize.
Programs will be available onsite to help spectators identify competitors and horses. A full list of competitions, entry information and details for those interested can be found at rigameadow.com
Whether an experienced equestrian or simply curious about the sport, the Lakeville Open Horse Show offers a chance to enjoy a Hudson Valley tradition that continues to bring the community together.
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