William Healy, junior varsity basketball player at SRHS, recalls the days of a packed home gym filled with SR students and families cheering him on, when a home game was an event for the community and something to be excited about. Healy reminisces, “Having that support from a home crowd actually does help, you can really feel the energy pushing you forward, it’s an amazing feeling.” 

Unfortunately these days are gone for Healy, as delays on construction continue and hope falters. 

Construction began on the athletics facilities the summer before the 2024 school year. The facilities undergoing construction are the pool, weightroom, locker rooms, main gym, cheer practice room, trainers office and tennis courts. All of the sports that use these facilities have been affected by the changes. 

Due to the construction, most sports have had to move all home games, and sometimes practices to nearby schools. With the limited amount of space, practices have been slotted at odd hours of the day, ranging from directly after school to 8 P.M. 

Casey Sully, the Athletic Director for SRHS, explains the difficulty of scheduling with the basketball teams, “There’s five teams that need the court, each team gets only an hour, that’s 5 hours,” he says. ”You’re finishing at 10 p.m. every day.” 

It would not be such an issue if it were only one team or two, but Mr. Sully points out that this has to be done for every team, and scheduling basketball practice is one of the easier things to do. Sports like water polo don’t even have a place to practice at the school; they have to travel every single day. 

Charles Bussi, a senior water polo captain at SRHS, shares some insight, “We not only have to go to Marin Academy to practice, but since it’s their pool, we have to schedule around them. And because of that, practice is almost never at the same time.” This hindrance for Bussi takes away from his ability to focus solely on his performance in water polo. He now has to balance checking the differing times which practices are for the week, make sure he doesn’t have any other responsibilities in the way, and after all that he has to enter a hostile environment for every single game. 

The construction doesn’t just affect the sports that rely on the main gym and the pool, it also affects the football team, specifically with the weight room. The gym has been moved away from the field, across campus, and into a much smaller space. “The downgraded weight room makes it hard to get a solid lift in with the small amount of space and large number of people,” says Nico Colbert, junior linebacker at SRHS.  “Lifting right is really important for injury prevention and making sure we’re in the best shape possible.” 

From the students interviewed, it is seen that almost all can agree that the construction, in some way or another, is a hindrance to them and limits their ability to perform at their best. However, the records of the respective teams seem to say differently. 

The question can then be asked: how much better could these already improving teams have been without the construction? 

That is yet to be decided, but Mr. Sully thinks that maybe the construction could be a positive for sports at SRHS. He says, referencing the construction, “It builds that sort of Bulldog mentality and that grittiness that other teams don’t get to build.” 

He likes to believe that because the athletes at SR have had to adapt and go through adversity, that when the construction finishes, they will be even stronger than before. If the athletes can weather this storm, then perhaps nothing will be able to affect them going forward.