By: Christian Guerrero
January 28, 2015
It was a great season to be a member of Inwood Academy’s Trailblazers.
The new school year brought about exciting changes to our programming along with bringing together many familiar faces while welcoming new ones. As we completed the first season our third year of athletic programming at IAL, we couldn’t be more pleased with the accomplishments of our scholar athletes and coaches.
Our Middle School (JHS) flag football, volleyball, and track teams returned this season, and we added a few new teams to the Trailblazers roster, JHS wrestling, girls High School (JV) basketball, and boys JV basketball. Combined, these teams are represented by eighty-one student athletes who all actively participate in team training and games and thirteen phenomenal coaches, four of which are our treasured volunteers.
The new Middle School building’s gym is the Trailblazers new gem. It’s allowed us to increase our practices times and our level of play. Our JHS volleyball team went undefeated in the regular season winning the Manhattan Regular Season Championship and came in second place in the Tournament Championship. Our first year JHS wrestling team produced an All-City Champion in the 210 pound weight class and is working hard to add more championships in the winter season. Both the girls and boys JV basketball teams had winning seasons, too.
As the Athletic Director, one of my proudest moments of this past fall was seeing how supportive the parents were in their child’s interest in sports. They happily came to our first athletics parent meeting, met with their child’s coaches, and made commitments to help their teams out by volunteering their time. I was also very proud to see the student athletes on our JHS and JV teams volunteering their time during IAL’s Season of Service, including their help with running a food drive in November, which distributed more than 10,000 pounds of food to families in Northern Manhattan. And the field trip the JV girls basketball team took early in the season, attending the Our Future, Our Rights – Youth Rising #UpForSchool rally, which was a United Nations event held at New York University. Our girls joined 300 other young activists demanding that world leaders keep to their promise that all children would be in school by the end of 2015.
My goal as Athletic Director isn’t simply to produce championships for our school, it’s to produce mature young people who can serve and lead others well.
By Kenneth Tejeda, kenneth.tejeda@inwoodacademy.org
