Senior athletes sound off to the split.

By TARA LEMM

Staff Writer

NORTH END — Two halves don’t always make a whole.

Generally when a new high school within the same district opens, the senior class is kept together or given a choice.

However, when Kingston High School opened the seniors were split, leaving a losing legacy for the sport teams.

North Kitsap High School’s teams struggled, but for a few individual athletes, and the story’s the same at KHS, except for the girl’s basketball, boy’s soccer and baseball teams.

While coaches may have been frustrated and fans not as entertained, the senior athletes paid the highest price.

Although most seniors enjoyed their final sports season, the fallout from the split — dividing up teammates, building teams from scratch, getting acquainted with new coaches and losing record — left distaste with some of the seniors; but not all.

In an effort to find the truth behind the split curtain The Herald gave five senior athletes from each high school a chance to sound off about the sporting split.

North’s senior athletes said they felt “shafted and short-changed,” and Kingston’s said the split resulted in “individual success and team failure.”

KINGSTON

The Buccaneers senior athletes enjoyed being team leaders, setting the standards and dabbling in sports they hadn’t played in years.

“The positive is more individuals got to turn out who didn’t necessarily turn out before,” said wrestling and fastpitch team member Blythe Peterson. “The negative is the skill level of the teams were not as good.”

Chris Hall, tennis, basketball and soccer player, hadn’t played basketball since ninth grade and when he moved to KHS he tried out and actually got to start. But the Bucs boy’s basketball team lost 18 in a row.

Another perk of the split Hall noted was the tennis team. He said the KHS boy’s tennis team was predominately seniors and at North if a senior doesn’t make varsity then they don’t get to play.

While Hall found inexperienced individuals filling varsity positions to be positive, others disagreed.

Both Peterson and Aubin Duncan, fastpitch and basketball player, said high school sports are on a different level and should be competitive.

“It’s more about the productivity of the team than who got to try out and what inexperienced person got on the team,” Duncan said.

All agreed that fan support was only up when the teams were winning, which, with the exception of a few teams, didn’t happen very often.

“Most of the time there wasn’t fan support because the teams lost,” said football, basketball and track team member Jack Clearman.

The seniors also found it difficult at times to work with underclassmen varsity athletes, who didn’t really have the skills to play at that level, but did due to the split.

Clearman observed this trend with the football and basketball teams, and Duncan didn’t notice disrespect but said underclassman athletes thought they had more talent than they really did.

Three of the five KHS seniors interviewed would’ve kept the class together.

“Sports would have done a lot better. Boy’s soccer would have won state, the football team would have been really good and girl’s basketball could have gone further,” Clearman said.

NORTH

Fun times playing sports with friends aside, North athletes did not like being in a 4A league as a “3A school.”

“You know you’re going to be in a league with all these teams better than you, it’s really frustrating throughout the year,” said soccer, basketball and fastpitch team member Ashley Tobin. “We lost. Losing sucks, that’s pretty much all it is.”

Similar to Kingston, North athletes agreed more people getting to play was the overarching positive of the split. But reaping that positive wasn’t worth losing all season long. And the timing couldn’t have been worse, as NKHS switches to an Olympic League 3A school next year.

“It really hurt us competitively, which sucked as a senior,” said tennis, basketball and baseball player Tyler Seth. “The timing was horrible. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

The Viking athletes enjoyed competing with less pressures, as they knew no one expected them to win, but when all the details shook out they’re still miffed about how the split came about.

They spoke out at school board meetings, they gathered signatures and they voiced their concerns to Superintendent Gene Medina.

But it was all for naught.

“Medina totally made us believe we would be able to stay together and like two months later he split us up,” Tobin said.

Kelly Cates, cross country and track team member and Stephanie Skelly, soccer player, added it seemed like decisions were made and then opinions were asked and “they gave us false hope so we wouldn’t riot.”

“Overall I feel like we’ve been shafted as seniors,” Skelly said. “The one saving grace they could have done to make us feel better was to save the sports.”

All five North athletes said they would’ve kept the class together or given the seniors a choice.