Schools

Winchester Athletic Program Looks to Add Intramurals

With growing enrollment, Winchester High School is looking to add more athletic programs.

With increasing enrollment, is looking at creating more sports for their students.

Over the next couple of years, the high school is expected to go from approximately 1,000 students to over 1,400, according to School Committee member, Michael Shindelman.

With the increase in students, Athletic Director Brian Carroll said that more students would be cut from high school sports, leaving more potential athletes with nothing to do during their high school careers. According to Carroll, the athletic department is currently looking at adding more sports, like crew, but also to create an intramural sports program.

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“We need an intramural program,” Carroll said. “The toughest part of my job is to have cuts. With the increasing enrollment they are going to get worse and we need to find a home for our athletes.”

One possibility, Carroll said, was to create a Sachem boot camp or to create a mountain bike club that can ride in the Fells.

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Over the last year, Winchester has added five more sports – boy’s volleyball, ultimate Frisbee, alpine skiing, nordic skiing and snowboarding – which allowed 150 more students to join a sport. But Carroll said that it’s expensive to run those sports and the school doesn’t have a lot of room left on the property where teams can practice.

Carroll said that in order to fully fund those new sports it would cost over $50,000 – volleyball ($5-6K), Frisbee ($6-7K) and skiing ($45K).

“It’s unreasonable to come [to the School Committee] and say we need $50,000,” Carroll said. “We need fundraisers, we need parents to help us raise money. The football booster club raised $16,000 last year for the team.”

However, Carroll said that the athletic department does not want to increase the user fees for its sports. Currently it costs $290 per student to compete in a sport. There is a family cap of $950. The ski team is the only exception, as their cost to participate is $500.

If anything, Carroll said, he would like to see the user fee remain about the same and eliminate the gate payment, where the schools get about $30,000 for the year.

“We would love to be like Woburn with no user fees, but that’s not possible for us,” Carroll said. “But I’d like to see us do something at the gate. The parents come to the game and they pay for tickets; it gets very costly.”

According to Carroll, he would like to be more in line with Lexington, who only charges for the Thanksgiving Day game. School Committee member Sarah Girotti suggested a family ticket or a season pass to keep the cost down for families.

But whatever is decided, Carroll said Winchester needs more sports.

“We need to keep these kids busy,” Carroll said. “Whether that’s through intramurals or more sports, we need to do it.”


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