Newtown High School Principal Lorrie Rodrigue and Athletic Director Gregg Simon promoted the benefits of athletics and shared a vision for the future of sports at NHS with the Board of Education during its meeting on October 21.

“If you have been to a sports event as an educator or a parent or, of course, as a community member, you really realize how truly lucky we are of the tremendous support that is shown on behalf of our students throughout the year,” said Dr Rodrigue.

Along with sharing statistics she garnered through research, Dr Rodrigue said playing sports in high school creates lifelong skills like sportsmanship, citizenship, teamwork, resiliency, perseverance, and self-discipline.

According to the presentation, NHS currently has 27 varsity sports, played by 745 students, 391 of whom are male and 354 are female.

Mr Simon said community and student interest in the NHS athletic department is at an “all-time high,” with nearly 2,000 followers on Twitter and nighthawksports.com receiving more than 20,000 visits since September.

“Much of this interest has been generated by our teams’ successes,” said Mr Simon, “winning six state championships in six different sports in the last three years. Our teams have also won 16 South-West championships and nine sportsmanship awards during that same time period. We sent 11 student athletes on to play at Division 1 schools last year, with several other athletes playing at Division 2 and Division 3 schools.”

Those successes, he said, were accompanied by the “true soul” of the department, with students completing different community service efforts, like fundraisers and food drives.

With interest at an “all-time high,” Mr Simon said he was before the board to speak about the growth of the NHS athletic department.

“We have been deeply impacted by the reduced budgets over the last few years,” said Mr Simon, “yet still continue to deliver an outstanding program.”

Each year, he said, student athletes at NHS pay “tens of thousands” in pay-to-participate fees, and students continue to present him with ideas for new teams.

“In 2001, ice hockey became a sport at [NHS] after years of years of debate,” said Mr Simon. “It was decided that ice hockey could begin, but would be fully funded by parents for the foreseeable future.”

Over the following ten years, Mr Simon said each idea for a new sport being added to NHS was met with an answer from the school board at the time that “we are not funding a new sport until we can more fully fund ice hockey.”

Through creative ways, Mr Simon said hockey now gets about $30,000 a year.

About ten years after ice hockey was added at the high school, Mr Simon said a group of parents came to him with the idea of adding gymnastics.

“They decided whatever the cost, they would fundraise and bring the sport to NHS with the hope that they would get it started and then receive board funding once it was an established sport,” Mr Simon said, adding the gymnastics team has grown and achieved successes, including earning one SWC championship and finishing as runner-up last year.

Mr Simon said he has asked for the gymnastics coach’s position to be funded by the district for the last three years, but it has been denied.

Other new sports requests, according to Mr Simon, have included girls’ golf and boys’ volleyball. In the spring of 2014 a girls’ golf club began, and after more than 50 boys attended an informational meeting last month about boy’s volleyball, Mr Simon said the boys and their parents are committed to starting the sport.

Asking for guidance from the school board, Mr Simon asked how to proceed in the future.

“The idea that we can’t start new programs until ice hockey is more fully funded is no longer applicable,” Mr Simon said. “Once programs, such as gymnastics, have proven to be viable there has to be some type of process that we can follow to get adequate funding. I’m asking the board to create a process through which the new athletic programs at the high school begin to receive funding so that more students have the opportunity to be student athletes.”

Superintendent of Schools Joseph V. Erardi, Jr, said he thought it would be fair to the NHS athletic department, administrators, and students if a process was created “to deliberate appropriately in order to make those hard decisions. They are all hard decisions.”

The board thanked Dr Rodrigue and Mr Simon for their presentation without further discussion of a possible new process at the October 22 meeting.