WOODBURY — It’s your first game of sixth grade: You’re excited, nervous and can’t control how you feel. The game goes on and it feels like it will never end. In the blink of an eye, you’re in your last game or sporting event of your middle school career. Your adrenaline is rushing like never before, you have multiple emotions; you’re happy, sad, frustrated, and last but not least, you’re in denial.
While these events are coming to an end students are preparing for their high school season, and one can’t help but wonder how they feel.
Amelia Ouellette, eighth-grade student-athlete at Woodbury Middle School said her emotions were stronger since she won’t be joining many classmates at Nonnewaug.
“Coming from a person who’s not gonna be with my friends next year, I kinda knew it was my last season playing with my best friends, so I guess those emotions were really upsetting,” Ouellette said.
Ouellette, who will be attending Taft, faces the struggles of knowing this is not only her last game, but also the last time playing with the people she’s played with for years. The bus rides, the wins, the losses, the bad and the good — all of these things are parts of the season that drastically impact the way individual athletes focus on the sport.
“I feel like in sixth grade you’re just starting out like back on the bottom, and then eighth grade, you feel like you like the queen of the world, then you just get booted back down as a freshman,” Ouellette said. “It’s kind of different from playing sixth- to eighth-graders because both of you aren’t fully like developed yet in high school. A freshman against a senior can be very intimidating to say the least.”
As athletes continue to play sports, they develop with it. When you are in eighth grade it almost feels like you’re the boss, like you’re the queen of the throne. As freshmen, student-athletes naturally start to take their sport seriously and learn they will go against teams that get scary but that only makes them stronger as players.
Chance Salisbury, a multi-sport athlete, says hustling and soaking in knowledge from older athletes will be important.
“I feel like I just have to learn from the people around me, like the seniors and the juniors,” Salisbury said, “and I gotta do the things that no one looks at, like going to get bags of basketballs to get set up.”
Salisbury, who will be attending Nonnewaug, says he knows that to gain respect from the older kids, he needs to give respect by showing he’s committed to this team as a whole, even if it means doing the dirty work.
“Naturally with anything that we’re doing when we get more responsibility, we feel more pressure, we feel more anxious about it,” states Adam Brutting, coach and teacher at WMS.
Brutting puts lots of energy into many students, as he is the coach of WMS track and girls basketball, and the NHS girls soccer team. As a former student-athlete during important points in his life, Brutting knows the stress that endures with new sports, schools, and final sporting events.
John Greene, coach and paraprofessional at WMS who graduated from Sacred Heart University in 2024, says he can relate to what eighth-graders will be experiencing.
“I’ve had to go through the same changes that they had to go through, and a year ago, I had a stop playing the sport that I had played my whole life,” Greene said, “so I think that that transition to then to now is something that I can kind of relate to them and throughout every game.”
As we continue our sports journey, we grow as individuals and as a team drastically. Making transitions throughout sports and new schools, can be a stressful and upsetting time for many, so it’s important to see the growth and opportunity that this transition brings.
As Albert Einstein said, “Negative people will always find a problem for every solution.” So, remember, as hard as it might seem, there’s always sunshine after rain. Being able to play on higher levels and allow people to challenge you, is one of the best ways to learn as an individual athlete and a team player.
