Red Arrow Legends - The Student-Athletes
The 1991-1992 JV Winter Cheerleaders
Justin Scott || Sports Reporter - 2/19/2014
This week we wanted to look at the broad 124 year history of Lowell High School Athletics by highlighting the student-athletes that have played sports at Lowell. I’ve written about the creation of the Red Arrow Athletics Archive a few times, but to build out the list of student-athletes at Lowell, it was done through the cataloguing of team photos. The captions that had the names of the student-athletes were then catalogued, broken out into a spreadsheet by year, sport, and eventually became the master roster of all Lowell student-athletes we know today.
Now there are over 12,000 unique individuals from Aaron Aalsgaard to Kerry Zywicki that have played sports at LHS in some capacity, so we aren’t highlighting each person individually, but what we can do is look at the student-athletes by sport, years, and see if there are any unique trends. A lot of the trends that have been extrapolated here make sense once you see the final results.
One interesting tidbit was to look at the last names of those in the database and see what was the most common. No, Zywicki wasn't one of them. Most of these aren’t surprising. The common surnames dominate this list; Smith, Johnson, Miller, Anderson. I think most of us know a few people today with those last names, and through the last century they have been common as well. Roth and Kropf though, are more regional and Lowellian names if you will. Down the list past the top ten all with over 40 individuals you can see other names famous in Lowell like Wittenbach, Doyle, McMahon, Bieri, Huver, Blough, and Oesch.
One trend is clear. As attendance, and the number of sports offered has gone up, participation goes up. No surprises there. The more choices there are, the easier it is to get involved.
The average Lowell student-athlete played 2.08 years in their sport. It is common to play freshman and JV years in a sport before either losing interest, the sport getting too competitive, or the student-athlete wanting to focus on sports they are stronger in. So plenty of two-year student-athletes in one sport to counter those that played all four years in one sport, or only played their freshman year.
In sports girls and boys are compared, there is not a clear trendline. In some sports girls stick with it longer than boys and vice versa. Boys soccer ranaway with the sport that student-athletes stayed in the longest, an average of 2.64 years. Now what does this mean? That’s up for interpretation. Is soccer just a more enjoyable sport to play and more likely to keep student-athletes all four years? Has strong leadership within the soccer program kept the JV to varsity transition smooth over the course of 40 years? Could be a lot of reasons.
Football leads the way in terms of most unique athletes which makes sense. Football has very large teams, dates back to 1900, and present day has freshman, jv, and varsity squads. Other sports with large teams and deep histories like track, baseball, and basketball are just behind.
