By Richard Carrier
Contributing Writer

It happens every year, and you’d think that after all this time I’d be prepared for it. But again, the end to the high school sports schedule caught me napping.

That should have come as no surprise to me, as napping is something I now do almost every day. But no season is as busy as spring and there I was covering at least a dozen games and matches a week with girls and boys soccer, girls and boys tennis, softball, boys and girls track and field and baseball deliciously filling up the sports pages. All of the teams advanced into district play, most into the regionals and three – Powhatan baseball, Powhatan softball and Blessed Sacrament baseball – advanced all the way to the state playoffs, where Coach James Poore’s kids took their first State Championship. Coach Poore is probably still mad at me for portraying his conglomerated ten-man squad as a “rag-tag” bunch but it was not my intent to demean the Knights, most of whom I’ve admired as I followed them through their entire multi-sport careers at BSH. Rather, I wanted to put them in the perspective of the unlikely-underdogs they were. It was a great accomplishment by a team that far exceeded the members’ credentials.

But anyway, one week I was scrambling around trying to figure out how to get it all covered and the next it just wasn’t there. Truly suddenly, the excitement of watching all of those teams excel and joining their fans and parents in trying to will them on was replaced by a vacuum. And then came, to no lesser degree, the sadness. How many of these kids, who had given us such joy and built such school and community spirit, would never step on our fields and courts again?

This is the hangover I get at the end of every sports year. There are dozens of seniors who have given us years of effort and achievement who now step off of our fields, tracks and courts for the very last time. And in the vast majority of cases, these seniors have played in their very last organized competition. Their athletic careers are over, often after somewhere between four and twelve years of practices, camps, training and competitions. And for many, even at this level, training had become a twelve month regimen. A tiny few will go on to play at the college level and slightly more for clubs in college. I’ll have a complete list of who and where in the next few weeks, but whenever I think about this, Courtney Fields comes to mind. Here’s a tiny but very talented senior soccer player who has dedicated years of training and practice to hone her skills to the point she fires shots on goal and scores at the rate of a Gatling gun (25 goals this season and over 65 for her career) for PHS. Next year? Maybe club soccer at James Madison. And how long will we remember her and her contributions to building community pride?

Depending on how you look at it, this is either a good or a bad thing. If we move our Shawn Minors, Ashley Chaneys, Colin Christovichs and Chris Howards to the Athletes Out Box we’ll make room for Hannah Livermon, John Moore, Austin Taylor, Laura Ramthum and dozens of others in the Athletes In Box and have a whole new crop of great experiences to look forward to. My hope is that we never forget the past contributors to the great legacy of Powhatan County sports; my reservation is that, once again, those contributors are gone without having received the appreciation they deserve from all of us. My regret is that, since I brought it up, I’ll now have the rest of the summer to get off of this guilt-trip.