After losing their season opener, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School field hockey team went on a hot streak this past week, winning two games in impressive fashion while tying two others, including a stalemate against Division I powerhouse Somerset, widely considered to be one of the strongest teams on the Vineyard’s schedule this year.
Coach Lisa Knight is ecstatic about her team’s performance. After a frustrating loss to Sandwich in the opener, team members were eager to get back on the field and prove themselves.
Sports of every kind were front and center across the Vineyard this week — from bars and living rooms where people watched the New England Patriots win the season opener and the Boston Red Sox inch closer to a postseason berth, to the high school athletic fields where several teams started their seasons with big wins.
Change is a constant in high school athletics, as players graduate at the end of each year and are replaced the next by a new crop of underclassmen. But as the fall sports season begins this week at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, there is so much change you might need a guide to sort it all out.
The weekend before Thanksgiving will be noticeably less festive on the Vineyard this year as school officials this week confirmed that the storied Island Cup football game with inter-Island rival Nantucket has been cancelled for the first time in almost 50 years.
Sandy Mincone, the new athletic director for the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, told the Gazette this week that Nantucket pulled out of the long-standing tradition due to financial reasons.
The Vineyard yet again has several youth soccer teams excelling in the post-season, as the under-12 team heads to league finals, the under 14-team heads to semifinals and the under-16 team has already qualified for the Massachusetts Tournament of Champions (MTOC).
It seems appropriate, somehow, that the first reward Bethany Pennington received upon hearing that she was the valedictorian of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School class of 2009 was extra homework.
“The principal called me into his office and said, ‘You’re the valedictorian. You have to make a speech at graduation and it’s due in three weeks,’” she said, laughing, in an interview at her father’s office yesterday.