It’s 7:30 a.m. and 2636 Latham Drive is abuzz with activity.

Music blares from the MP room as the Jazz Band launches into another song, while next door the music room fills with the sound of tuning instruments as the chamber ensemble readies to play, and across campus the gym echoes with shouts from the boys’ varsity basketball team, who have already been practicing for an hour.

The day starts and, after seven hours of classes and electives, this scene repeats itself as the last bell of the day signals the beginning of another frenzied round of practices, games and rehearsals.

The 135 high-school students work overtime to support over 30 extracurriculars, with the average student committed to three-and-a-half activities.

According to Lonna Bloedau, director of admissions, this is one of the school’s selling points.

She described the extracurriculars as the “pulse and nerves” of the school.

“They round out the students; they provide open forums for expression, for dialogue, debate and interpretation,” Bloedau said. “They give practical application to classroom lessons, and they extend the concrete learning into abstract thinking.”

But does this high involvement stretch students too thin, thereby weakening individual programs?

This is, in a phrase, the “Country Day Conundrum.”

Jason Kreps, coach of both the girls’ varsity volleyball and ski and snowboard teams, believes over-extended students hurt the school’s athletics.

“(We’re) hurting our own programs,” Kreps said, referring to the large number of Country Day athletes who play more than one sport a season.

According to a poll, of the 75 percent of the high school who has or will play a sport this year, 20 percent have or will participate on multiple teams a season.

Kreps sees this as a problem.

“If someone is trying to do multiple sports at the same time, they aren’t able to give their full effort to any of them,” Kreps said.

He questions the logic of offering 15 sports annually when the student body is not, in his opinion, large enough to support them.

This spring, for instance, eight sports are being offered, up from seven last year.
To field so many different teams, many athletes play on two or more, which, Kreps believes, brings down the level of play.

“But that’s the Catch-22,” he said. “This also gives our students some great opportunities.”

These opportunities don’t come without a price, as seen most clearly during the spring season.

While the tennis and track teams sent representatives to their championships last year, the golf team won theirs, and girls’ soccer made it to playoffs, other spring sports seem to have fallen by the wayside.

The baseball team hasn’t won more than four games in a season since ’08-09.

Softball has had three wins total since the team was founded three years ago.

And although the swimming/diving team has had members qualify for sectionals, the team had only three participants last year.

Baseball coach Chris Millsback says that between student activities and all the spring sports, it’s “very difficult” to field a team each year.

“There are a lot of sports to choose from, and then when you throw other activities like
Octagon, Mock Trial and drama on top of everything, kids are being pulled in too many directions,” Millsback said.

And, even with a full team, Millsback struggles to make it truly competitive due to poor practice attendance as athletes split time between sports.

“Simple reasoning tells you that (multi-sport athletes) won’t be as good as they can be,” Millsback said.

Athletic director Matt Vargo, boys’ soccer coach, disagrees with Millsback.

“I don’t think (the teams) would be more competitive necessarily,” he said, pointing out that Country Day teams already play “right,” with coaches keeping academic performance the priority.

Vargo added that while it can be a “challenge” to schedule multi-sport athletes, “there are certain sports that just wouldn’t have a team if sports didn’t share players.”

Senior Trevor Sutley, who played soccer and cross country in the fall and is playing baseball and lacrosse this spring, feels that juggling two sports in one season is “completely doable.
“It’s all about prioritizing,” Sutley said.

And yet it is this same prioritizing that junior Ben Hernried (who plays exclusively baseball) blames for lowering Country Day’s level of play in the spring.

“They have to pick and choose which practices they go to, and coaches become very casual about attendance,” Hernried said. “This may bring down skill level later on in the games.

“A lot of people just don’t take sports seriously.”

On the other hand, junior Jacob Frankel considers this casual approach a plus.

“I think that part of being at a small school is that you don’t necessarily have to take sports seriously and you can try a lot of them,” he said.

High extracurricular involvement seems to be, as band director Bob Ratcliff puts it, “the culture of our school,” and unavoidable as so few students work to support so many activities.

For instance, of the 28 students (of 114 polled) who identified as musicians, 24 participate in sports as well, and all but one have other extracurricular activities.

But Ratcliff says his students’ schedules don’t bother him.

“It’s my belief that everyone should do something academic, something athletic and something artistic, so you stretch yourself those ways,” Ratcliff said. “Stretch your mind, stretch your body, stretch your soul.”

Then, he believes, everyone should choose one area and “strive to be really exceptional at it.”

Because of this belief, Ratcliff doesn’t mind sharing his musicians with other activities.

“I don’t expect everyone to be an exceptional musician,” Ratcliff said, recognizing that some of his students choose to go in depth in other areas, which, for them, take precedent over music.

This aside, however, Ratcliff is frustrated by his students, many of whom, he feels, do not put the kind of time or effort he wants into music.

“Everybody has their reason for not putting in the time, whether it’s that they’re overcommitted or they just don’t care,” Ratcliff said. “More often than not (with this band) it’s because they’re overcommitted.”

According to Ratcliff, if every student spent one to two hours practicing a night, “we’d have a program that would just kill. It’d be unbelievable.

“But that’s not going to happen.”

Ratcliff isn’t alone in this sentiment.

Sophomore Garrett Kaighn, a saxophonist in Jazz and Concert Band, agrees there is room for improvement in the Jazz Band at least.

“Concert Band has more inexperienced people than Jazz Band,” Kaighn said, “so it’s not at the same level regardless. “But the Jazz Band would definitely improve if people practiced more.”

This culture of high involvement has also taken its toll on the drama department.

“The school (administration) wants a lot of people involved (in drama),” director Brian Frishman said.

“They want a lot of bodies on stage.”

But Frishman describes the task of scheduling around the many commitments of his large casts as “impossible,” saying students end up missing rehearsals regularly.

“This limits the productions,” Frishman said. “It can keep their full potentials from being realized.”

Frishman does his best to get the time he needs with his actors, meeting with students at lunch, after school, and making up practices with individual students.

However, he said he still wants more time to work with them.

“A lot of the time I’m directing strictly for results, not process,” Frishman said.

“I have to show an actor exactly what to do instead of having the time for them to find it and make the role their own.”

Currently, the drama department is working to put on a play inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People.”

The production will involve music and dancing and, according to Frishman, organizing it so far has been “a nightmare.”

Frishman isn’t the only one who struggles to rehearse with a full cast. Jeanine Boyers, coach of the Mock Trial team, has been forced to reshuffle roles for competition again and again thanks
largely to student absences.

“It’s like a Rubik’s cube,” she said of the large team (almost one-fifth of the high school participates). “You move one thing, and the whole picture changes.”

Thanks to this “domino effect,” Boyers has had to reassign roles six times so far, reshuffling parts for several reasons, but “overwhelmingly because students were unable to commit.”

“Everyone’s doing numerous activities, and they’re stuck going in a million directions and can’t focus on the team,” Boyers said.

Students forced to miss practices “easily” fall behind their peers, creating extra work for the coaches and Mock Trialers who have to bring them up to speed.

“It’s just not a good use of time,” Boyers said, putting unneeded pressure on the whole team.

According to Boyers, other schools don’t have this problem.

“The top schools have kids sign a contract saying they will only do Mock Trial, nothing else,” she said.

Though Boyers doubts Country Day will ever adopt so stringent a policy, she finds herself at odds with the school’s policy.

“Not everyone should do everything,” Boyers said. “Students should focus on just one or two things instead of over reaching.”

In AP Studio Art, time-strapped students have also caused problems, according to teacher Patricia Kelly.

In the eight years she has taught the class, not one Country Day artist has ever submitted to the AP board for review.

“There have been, and are, students capable of doing this, but no one ever submits a portfolio,” Kelly said.

Kelly says part of the problem is time.

A completed AP art portfolio requires 24 pieces, demonstrating the artist’s breadth of ability and a concentration. Five pieces are sent in (the rest are submitted digitally).

Because not every piece of art is up to these standards, according to Kelly, students must have an extensive body of work before they begin to revise and select pieces.

“It’s quite a lengthy process,” Kelly said, one that is often started by her students, but has not been completed in a long time—and probably won’t be this year either.

While seniors Alex Stamatis and Barrie Feusi are unsure whether they’ll submit, Grace Mehta, Sasha Ragland, and Ryan Ho know they won’t.

“It’s very time consuming,” Ho said. “Besides, it’s not like I’m going to focus on art in college.”

And Ho isn’t the only one with college on the mind; on top of all their academic and extracurricular commitments, juniors and seniors have the ever-growing college application process to look forward to.

This year, the average senior applied to 11 colleges, up from seven 10 years ago, said college counselor Patricia Fels.

The number of activities they participate in ranges from 0-11, with the majority involved in 3-4.

But Fels thinks that this high-involvement approach to college applications is no longer the “hook” schools are looking for.

“There was a time when the idea was to do as many activities as possible. Everyone had a lot of activities so that they could list them all on the lines of the college application,” Fels said.

But now highly selective schools are looking instead for students who have a “passion” for something, according to Fels.

“I’m a proponent of finding a passion and immersing yourself in it,” Fels said.

She does, however, admit that both graduates with a clear “passion” and those involved in a “huge number of things” have gone on to prestigious colleges.

She also recognizes the difficulty of focusing on fewer activities.

“The reality of it is a lot of people don’t discover their passions in their sophomore or junior years of high school,” Fels said.

But in her capacity as newspaper advisor, she does find Country Day’s culture of wide involvement “really frustrating.”

“I look at someone who has enormous talent (for writing or design), and I think, if this were a public school, this person would be much more concentrated,” Fels said.

“And instead the person gets pretty good at a bunch of things.”