Did you know that Forest Hills Central has twenty-seven different sports that are offered across three seasons? I’m sure everyone knows about football, soccer, basketball, and lacrosse, but how many of those sports are you unaware of?

Senior Lauren Wolffis is a gymnast on the Forest Hills United gymnastics team which is made up of girls from all three Forest Hills schools. As a young girl, she was fascinated by the idea of doing cool flips and tricks, and she has continued to keep that interest throughout high school. After competing on the team for all four years of her high school career, she has been able to experience the disappointment of how few people actually know about and support the team.

“Our school is doing a better job advertising that we have a team now than what we did my freshman year, but it would definitely be nice to have more representation,” Lauren said. “Our team made it to states last year, and it was kind of sad that we didn’t have a lot of students and teachers cheering us on or congratulating us in the halls as they do with other sports.”

While Lauren strives for more representation for the gymnastics team, Masyn Cole is a senior on the equestrian team and feels differently about how her sport should be promoted. 

“I don’t think our sport is advertised very well at our school, but I don’t feel like it needs to be since it isn’t one of our school’s big sports like it is at other schools,” Masyn said. “All schools have major sports and for us, that is football, lacrosse, and basketball. Popular sports are always highlighted and I feel it should stay that way.”

All teams need to advertise their sport for many different reasons, but the sports that aren’t talked about as much always end up needing the most help. Everyone knows we have a football team because of its history of success which helps bring more people to want to join, but what happens if other teams aren’t getting recognized for their success?

Senior Noelle Stewart is a member of the field hockey team and she expressed how important the number of players is in her sport. “Field hockey is a fairly easy game to understand, and you can start playing at any age with no experience. So, if more people knew about it, then hopefully our team could gain more players which would help us play better overall,” Noelle said. “This year, we had ten seniors which was half of our team and ow next year our team will really struggle if there are only ten returning players.”

Similarly to Noelle, fellow teammate senior Elizabeth Ptak said, “I think field hockey is decently advertised. For example, all of our games are on FX and sports highlights, but I do think people have the wrong impression of it because it isn’t very popular. I wish more people would come out and watch a game to help promote our team.”

The more the word spreads about some of these teams, the more interested fellow classmates and teachers might be to come and watch. Attendance and support from others can be important while playing a sport. Having that extra energy can help out a team if they are struggling along with keeping the team excited if they are doing well. 

“At home games, we usually just have family members and maybe a few friends that come support,” Elizabeth said. “It would be nice if people would actually show up and we had a student section.”

Although these three sports aren’t represented as well as they should be, they aren’t the only ones. Keep your eyes open for more opportunities to go support your fellow unappreciated and unknown Ranger teams because it might be just the thing they need to succeed.