The months are winding down, the weather is turning hotter, and the bears are coming out of hibernation, which could only mean one thing: the spring sports season is coming to a close. As the teams take to the fields and tracks for the final few games and meets, we look back on the expectations made for the season by the captains of each respective teams to see if they reached their goal to make the playoffs, and, above all else, beat every other team to the ultimate prize of the division 2 state championship.

Boys lacrosse captain Jordan Grimaldi was first to talk about their season. When speaking on the current state of the team, Grimaldi stated that it could be “interpreted with one word: promising. We have a good mix of experienced and new players.” When asked what the ultimate goal for the season is, “obviously we want to win the championship, every team wants to win the championship, but we also want to have a perfect record, or at least a winning record.” It’s fair to say that they achieved this by obtaining an impressive 8-2 record.

We then spoke to boys tennis captain, River Collins, and girls tennis star, Anna Alberghini. River was asked what he was looking forward to this season, “We have a great group of guys compared to last year you know we didn’t have a full team, and this year we have like 15 guys a bunch of freshmen and I think a bunch of them are actually pretty talented on the court and I think we can get a team more dubs than last year.”

Next, we spoke to the girl’s lacrosse captain, Anna Kudriavetz. When she was asked how the season was going, she replied, “We are having fun. We started strong, but we have recently hit a rough patch with some tough opponents, but hopefully, we will prevail.” She added, “Both our underclassmen and seniors are looking good. The goal for the season is to “give 110% and get some wins.”

When asked what his favorite things about tennis are, Collins said, “Hitting the ball is so satisfying, and when you hit that ace of a serve and you have Rohin on the other side of just can’t get that back because he’s so bad that’s just the most satisfying thing about the sport and especially with our team the sportsmanship and the community of it it’s just so fun and you can go after school it’s just me and you can let loose on the court. Their season has not gone well, as they haven’t won a single meet.

Alberghini said, “ I’m excited for all the girls, they’re all getting super nasty at tennis and we’re probably gonna be every single person and make them cry and I’m really excited about it.” When asked about joining tennis she said, “It’s really fun. We go to matches, eat a lot of snacks, hang out, and cheer teammates on. And you can learn a lifelong sport, so yeah, you should probably join. It’s really fun.” However, their record is as fun as they hoped, standing at 2-8 at the end of the season.

Baseball is a game of patience and pure determination and the definition of a team sport. Former Division 1 college baseball player and Harwood coach Luke Russell said “I’m looking forward to continuing to build on the strong season we had last year, and making another run at the state championship with the guys. We’re returning 7 of our 9 starters from last year, and have a lot of young talent joining the team as well. Our pitching is going to be one of our greatest strengths this year, but we’re also solid defensively and don’t have any holes in our lineup. We’ve got a couple guys that are going to steal a ton of bases this season, and our speed and aggressiveness on the bases is what’s going to set us apart from a lot of the other teams in Division 2. If we can put it all together, we should have a good shot to make a deep run in playoffs this year.”

We also spoke with Brennen Dasaro about the upcoming baseball season. Dasaro said, ”I’m excited for that Chizzy and to get some bags and stolen bases.” Finally we spoke to junior captain Nic Moran who said, “The team is looking good this year and I think we will go pretty far”. Moran also said he was excited to “hit some dingers.” It could be going worse or better for the boys as they achieved a 5-5 record this season.

With the playoffs coming up, we wish all the teams the best of luck, GO HARWOOD!