This is part two of a multi-part series on multi-sport athletes in High School
While the number of multi-sport athletes have declined, there are still students at Hempfield who are willing to accept the challenge of balancing their school work with multiple sports.
Junior Dylan Firmstone is committed to Penn State for baseball, but he also plays on the boys varsity basketball team. Dylan has experimented in other sports like football and cross country. All throughout his life he’s tried to participate in multiple sports to try and improve his game.
“Mostly all the sport’s I’ve played helped me improve my footwork and build up a lot of my coordination which helps me on the mound.”
In today’s day and age, athletes are asked to be committed to a team throughout the entire year. Softball has practices in the winter when their season is in spring, Basketball even has open gyms in the spring when their season just ended. The demand for sports is high, and to have to balance multiple of them while maintaining a good performance is challenging, but not impossible.
Junior Allie Dematt is in an extremely rare situation. She manages to play 4 sports in just three sporting seasons. She started off her junior year playing soccer in the fall. In the winter, she played indoor track. And in the spring, she is playing lacrosse and doing track. There is already a low number of athletes that play two sports, but Allie manages to play two at the same time! However, Allie doesn’t feel it’s as hard as people may think.
She says, “I usually just have to go from practice to practice and try to eat a snack in between. It’s really important for me to stretch correctly because with so much activity it can be hard to keep my muscles healthy and prevent them from being tight. But it really isn’t as hard as it seems, just very time consuming.”
Finding time to do her school work is the biggest challenge for Allie. Allie was recently voted for class treasurer, and still manages to do great in her classes.
She says, “it can be hard most days,but I usually do my work while I eat at dinner or in the morning in my homeroom or my study halls. Really just whenever I have time.”
Both Allie and Dylan both excel in their sports and in the classroom as they are both planning on continuing their athletic and academic careers in college. They are two of the few that play multiple sports, and they make this seemingly daunting task work, and are exceptional at what they do.
