Freshmen Athletes Experience Their First BHS Season
As Berkeley High School enters its final season of sports and says goodbye to some of its beloved athletes, BHS also welcomes a new generation of Yellowjackets to the field.
As Berkeley High School enters its final season of sports and says goodbye to some of its beloved athletes, BHS also welcomes a new generation of Yellowjackets to the field.
Many athletes, including students at Berkeley High School, train, play, and practice year-round in order to be competitive. To succeed in BHS’s soccer program, many players like Academic Choice sophomore Finn Gohlke, who plays on the BHS boys varsity team, play outside of the winter season.
Students caught sleeping, making an ugly eating face, or parking badly may find themselves awarded 15 minutes of fame at Berkeley High School. This notoriety is thanks to the student-run Instagram accounts that are unofficially affiliated with BHS, such as @bhs.slump or @berkeleyhighfits.
For many female athletes, the story is all too familiar. Entering high school, an athlete often quickly gains skill, fueled by hormones and a steep increase in training difficulty.
With Berkeley High School sports such as water polo or soccer at the forefront of students’ minds, it is often easy to forget that there is a rich multitude of other sports at the school.
At the close of the 2021 fall season, Berkeley High School’s varsity football team finished with a 3-6 record. “The guys played really hard. We had the opportunity to win every game, even if it didn’t always go our direction,” said James Hodgins, head coach of varsity football.
Here are some things lefties deal with regularly: metal rings digging into their skin as they write in spiral-bound notebooks, ink smearing all over their hands while taking notes, and strained backs from hunching over desks with no arm support.
Over the past years, youth sports have become highly competitive. As a result, youth athletes are being pushed to train harder and longer. Along with an increase in intensity, there has been an uptick in the number of sports-related injuries.
On August 28, Berkeley High School announced to the community that they had gotten a sufficient number of kits to test staff and a small subset of students.
As the various scholastic endeavors of the year approached, fall sports at Berkeley High School began before the school year’s start. Water Polo – The girls and boys water polo teams took a plunge into the fall season, the boys team coming off of a West Alameda County Conference championship.
The Olympic Games, being one of the most complex and most watched sporting events in the world, immediately gives a huge platform to its competitors. When athletes make choices outside of the norm, an insane flurry of media coverage follows
Gil Gvishi Gil Gvishi, a senior in Berkeley International High School and captain of the Berkeley High School boys varsity water polo team, grew up submerged in the world of water polo.
With so much uncertainty surrounding the state of COVID-19, it’s impossible to predict when things may start to return to normal. Just as businesses began to reopen and there was talk of in-person school, case numbers began to rise and forced the Bay Area back into lockdown.
Despite everyone’s best wishes, the condition of the coronavirus in California is only worsening. This comes as terrible news for youth sports organizers who have been putting in effort to ensure a safe athletic season.
At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, Berkeley High School students have adapted to conducting most aspects of their lives online. While seeing friends, classmates, and teachers exclusively over Zoom has become the norm, one aspect of school that has not translated effectively to remote learning is the athletics program.
Fields, pools, and bleachers have sat empty on the Berkeley High School campus since March. Although a return to in-person classes is looking more likely in Berkeley, the future of BHS athletics is still shrouded in uncertainty. In early September the BHS Athletic Directors shared a potential plan for a return to practices.
Berkeley High School has developed a new plan for sports and athletics during this unprecedented school year. The safety and health of each student, faculty, and family member connected to BHS is a top priority for the school at this time.
On July 20, after several months of debate and public pressure, the California Interscholastic Federation announced that the 2020-21 school year will begin with a modified sports schedule due to COVID-19.