STARTING THE SEASON OFF RIGHT

By DILLON SULLIVAN

DILLON SULLIVAN FOR THE WIZARD WEEKLY

At 6:30 pm on December 3rd, the Washingtonville Varsity Boys’ basketball team faced off against New Paltz. The Huguenots, who are defending Section 9 Class A champions, agreed to come play an out of conference game in Washingtonville. After beating Washingtonville by 2 points and one point in their last two matchups respectively, New Paltz was ready for a hard fought game. Back and forth the entire thirty-two minutes, this was nothing short of a thriller.

For this season, the basketball team has prepared differently than they have in years previous. With the players open to trying new things in order to win, Coach Rose contacted his good friend Ms. Cooney to see if she would be willing to give yoga classes to the team. She agreed, and now the team does yoga once a week to better themselves both mentally and physically. “I feel that yoga is good for us as a team. It gets us stretched out for practice…” exclaimed junior guard, Kael Leonard, “... it’s not all just physically stretching, it’s a lot of mental preparation which helped us out to dig deep against New Paltz when things weren’t going our way.” Not only does yoga get athletes stretched out, but the difficult movements teach you how to rise up through adversity, something the Wizards showed on Monday night.

As well as yoga, the basketball team is going to the weight room for the first time in years. “The weight room is a new thing this year. I feel like it has gotten the team stronger, and has given us all more confidence,” explained junior captain Ryan Graham. Although the players are sore after the workouts, it gets them ready for very physical games like this one was.

With all this training and preparation, the Wizards were ready for the first of many tests this season. The game went basket for basket in the first half, with both teams playing sloppy and nervously, which is to be expected in the first game of the season. Neither team really had any big momentum shift until the last second of the first half, when New Paltz guard, Casey Burke, hit a 3 to put his team up 1 heading into halftime, and silencing Wizard Nation.

Carrying this momentum into the fourth quarter, New Paltz looked like defending champions as they took control in the third, and kept the Wizards down 6 almost the whole second half. But as the Wizards learned in yoga, mind over matter kept them going through adversity. Ryan Graham hit three pointers on back to back possessions with two minutes left to erase the New Paltz lead. “I knew we had it in us to pull out the win. We were prepared for the adversity being down late in the fourth, so of course I thought we had a chance to win,” voiced Graham. 

With the student section going crazy, Washingtonville riding all their momentum, and the team hitting their free throws late, the Wizards pulled out the win 60-55.   This team is different, and the big first win for the Wizards is a strong start for remainder of the long season ahead.