For the past three seasons, Summit K2 High School hasn’t had a girls basketball team due to girls not showing up for tryouts.
Leilani, a 10th grader at Summit K2 High school said “I heard about [the team] but nobody ever… did nothing….”
Summit K2’s Athletic Director Keith Seales Sr explained why it was not brought back after COVID. “When we had… tryouts for basketball it was for [both] boys and girls. …but zero girls came out…. We tried to hold them twice but [once again] no girls came out so we had to move on with our season,” said Seales.
Summit K2 High School had a girls basketball team between the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years.
COVID-19 halted all the sports at K2 High School. Ever since Summit went back to in-person school in 2021 the girls basketball team has not restarted. The girls basketball team was the only sport that didn’t last through COVID.
Pre COVID there were 11 players on the team, now only 1 player still attends Summit K2 High School.
On the team six out of the 11 players were 11th and 12th graders and the rest were either 10th or 9th graders. There was no Junior Varsity (JV) team for girls basketball.
Before COVID girls basketball recruited people through networking. “I think people just.. found friends who wanted to play, i don’t think any of my friends wanted to play, but my teammates had friends who were like ‘come on, come play….’” Said Victoria Tyler, a former player on the girls basketball team and former K2 student.
Tyler continues to say. “It’s fun to see how the program grew because at first…we were trying to get people who want to play… and at the end,… when I graduated, there were enough people… and i didnt have to play the whole game because we didn’t have subs.”
When asked if she had a chance to play on the girls basketball team would she do it, Keyomie B. a 9th grader at Summit K2 high school said “I like basketball in general so I’m… gonna join the team [next year].”
Girls soccer also took a hiatus during COVID, a lot of their players graduated, and they didn’t have a JV team before COVID.
Girls basketball is currently going through the same things. One thing girls soccer did do though was go around classrooms to make announcements about tryouts and advertise the team more.
During the 2018-19 school year the Varsity girls basketball team had 5 wins and 5 loses. Later in the 2019-20 school year the Varsity girls basketball had 0 wins and 13 loses.
(Illustration Credit: Iris Wiley Sittler)
