Harker volleyball team member Shannon Richardson, grade 9, wrapped up a stellar July by winning the USA Beach Junior Volleyball Championships, (National Division), age 14 and under category, with her partner, Alexandra Kim of Daly City. The event was held in Milwaukee, on July 28-29. In the two days of play, Richardson and Kim went undefeated.
Richardson and Kim competed against 16 other teams from around the country for the title. “It was a fantastic tournament,” said Ben Barr of USA Beach Junior Volleyball. “They should be very proud!”
In her warm up to nationals, Richardson had a great round in July, including four tournaments and a high performance camp and mini-tournament that was even tougher than the Nationals event.
Her first event was July 14. Richardson and her partner for the trip, Chanti Holroyd, a freshman at Mountain View High School, competed in a California Beach Volleyball Association (CBVA) Cal Cup Qualifier in Pacific Palisades, earning first place in the age 14 and under category, qualifying them for the Sept. 2 championships in Manhattan Beach (see photos – Richardson is on the left in both, Holroyd is wearing the black and white top; Kim is wearing a tee shirt).
Next stop was the USA Junior Beach Volleyball High Performance Camp at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista. At the conclusion of the four-day camp on July 18, Richardson participated in a mini-tournament in which girls had to play with a different partner for every match. Richardson was the only camper who did not lose a single match with any of her partners.
Immediately afterwards, Richardson moved on to the USA Junior Beach High Performance Championships at Hermosa Beach, July 19-21. The tourney started with two days of pool play, followed by a day with cross pool and finals. Richardson and Holroyd lost only one match on the first day of pool play, so advanced to finals where they took the gold medal, beating the one team they had lost to in pool play.
Next, July 22, the pair went after the 16-and under category in a CBVA tournament in Doheny, Calif., where they had some tough practice and earned second place.
Richardson’s last outing in this trip was a CBVA Qualifier in Santa Barbara July 24 where Richardson and Holroyd took first place, beating the team they lost to in Doheny two days earlier.
Richardson, who has competed for Harker since grade 4, then traveled to Milwaukee for the USA Junior Beach Championships, where she and partner Kim triumphed!
It’s not every day Harker librarians get the opportunity to spread their passion for reading by handing out free copies of their favorite books to an unsuspecting public.
Armed with a fierce belief in the power of the written word, two Harker librarians joined fellow bookworms from across the United States in participation of World Book Night, an ambitious campaign to give away half a million books for free in just one day.
On April 23, Lauri Vaughan, upper school campus librarian and Bernie Morrissey, middle school librarian, undertook the concerted effort to promote the joy of reading – one person at a time. From Kodiak, Ala., to Key West, Fla., in 6,000 towns and cities across America, volunteers like Vaughan and Morrissey went out into the community in order to share books in locations as diverse as hospitals, nursing homes, schools, ballparks, mass transit, diners and more.
Volunteers were given 20 specially printed copies of their stated favorite books, personally giving them away to new or light readers. They tried to reach many people in underserved places, knowing that a book has the power to open up the doors to new possibilities, and help make the world a better place.
American booksellers and publishers partnered with the first World Book Night in the U.S., following the impressive launch of this campaign by their bookselling and publishing colleagues in the U.K. and Ireland last year. This year, World Book Night took place in the U.K., U.S., and Germany, with thousands of volunteers going out into their communities to give away the special free paperbacks.
Vaughan, who is vice president of the Bay Area Independent School Librarian Association, chose to give out 20 copies of Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” at the Summit Store on Summit Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
“I gave away 20 copies … it was so fun! I had to convince shoppers in about 10 seconds they should take the book from me. I had about a 90 percent success rate – almost anyone who listened took a copy of the book. Some needed convincing, but I loved the guy who said, ‘I know this book!’ and snatched it out of my hand. Overall it was a wonderful experience and gave me a great opportunity to practice my reading evangelism in public. It took me about a half hour to give away all 20 copies of ‘Ender’s Game,’” recalled Vaughan.
Meanwhile, Morrissey took to the streets of San Francisco, handing out his beloved copies of Patti Smith’s “Just Kids” at the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ rehearsal. “All 20 copies were gone in less than five minutes. I had announced the event in email and Facebook messages ahead of time, but some who didn’t get the message were suspicious about something being offered for free, with no strings attached. If given the opportunity, I would definitely participate again next year, probably by standing at the corner of 18th and Castro, handing out books in a much less structured environment,” he said.
The books, whittled down to 30 popular titles, were chosen by a panel of booksellers and librarians through several rounds of voting. The printing of the free books was possible due to generosity of the authors, publishers and book manufacturing companies.
Examples of some of the books handed out included: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou (Ballantine), “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic), “Blood Work” by Michael Connelly (Grand Central), “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers (Vintage), “The Stand” by Stephen King (Anchor) and “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult (Atria).
World Book Night in the U.S. is a nonprofit organization, backed by publishers, Barnes & Noble, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, Ingram Content Group, United Parcel Services, and more than a dozen printers and paper companies.
Anna Quindlen, the U.S. campaign’s Honorary National Chairperson, said: “What’s better than a good book? A whole box of them, and the opportunity to share them with new readers. The idea behind World Book Night is inspired, and as a writer and a reader I’m thrilled to be part of it.”
Student golfer Maverick McNealy, who will enter grade 12 this fall, managed to make it to the final eight at the USGA Junior Amateur championship, held July 16-21 at the Golf Club of New England in Stratham, N.H.
McNealy faced Canada’s Matthew Scobie in the quarterfinal match, where he rallied back from 4 down after eight holes, winning three straight holes with birdies on holes nine and 10 and a bogey on hole 11. The back-and-forth continued with Scobie winning holes 12 and 14, and McNealy responding with a pair of birdies on the next two holes. On hole 18, McNealy earned a par to force the match to extra holes. Both players scored par on hole 19, but Scobie parred on the 20th hole to finally win the match.
“Though it was slightly disappointing, I was very, very happy with my first performance on an international stage,” McNealy said. “By making the top 8, I earned an exemption from qualifying for next year’s Junior Amateur at Martis Camp in Tahoe! Very exciting!”
McNealy closed several point deficits in the early rounds to qualify for the top 64, defeating Cameron Young of Scarborough, N.Y., Dylan Wu of Medford, Ore. and China’s Zecheng Dou.
June 13, 2012:
Rising senior Maverick McNealy recently took second place overall at the U.S. Junior Amateur qualifying golf tournament at the Sunnyside Country Club in Fresno. McNealy shot 70-73, earning the final spot in the U.S. Junior Amateur Championship by a single shot, becoming one of 150 golfers in the country younger than 18 to compete in the championship.
The Sunnyside tournament was McNealy’s third attempt at qualifying for the U.S. Junior Amateur. In 100-degree weather, the tournament was especially challenging. “It was very difficult to stay mentally and physically sharp,” he said, “but I think the fact that I was very regimented with nutrition and hydration allowed me to make up a lot of ground on the second round.”
Part of the secret to McNealy’s recent success has been his steady training routine. “I practice and play every day of the summer, and have a very regimented pre-tournament routine. I do a workout two days before a tournament, but none the day of or day before. I get to the course 50 minutes before my tee time, and warm up on the range (I hit 13 wedges, 13 irons and 13 woods), then I chip and hit sand shots for about five minutes, and then putt until I head to the first tee,” he said.
McNealy will compete in the California State Amateur tournament in late June before heading to the U.S. Junior Amateur in July. He hopes one day to play division 1 golf in college.
Harker’s budding painters, photographers and mixed media gurus participated in two local art competitions in April and May, coming away with some prestigious awards. The office of Congressman Mike Honda held its annual “An Artistic Discovery” art contest on April 24.
The contest was open to students residing or going to school within the 15th Congressional District (which includes Harker). Winners included Anika Radiya-Dixit, grade 11, for best discussion piece, Sanjana Baldwa, grade 12, for best work in photography and Aditya Sastry, grade 12, for honorable mention in photography. Well done!
The museums of Los Gatos held “Social Matters,” a juried art exhibition at the Los Gatos Art Museum on May 9. The competition asked grade 9-12 students from around Santa Clara County: “What matters?” Awards ranged from being selected as an exhibited work to a grand prize award of $5,000.
Artists also could choose to include their framed pieces in a silent auction. Congratulations to Kacey Fang, grade 9, Tara Rezvani, grade 11, and Karen Wang, grade 12, whose art was exhibited and shown in the museum’ art reception.
Harker’s summer sports performance program has provided an excellent opportunity for summer students to improve their overall athleticism.
“What we’re doing is taking a very fundamental approach to sports performance. It doesn’t really matter what sport you play as long as it’s a ground-based sport,” said Ron Forbes, Harker’s director of sports performance, who heads up the six-week program. Students began by working balance, footwork, agility and other core aspects of ground-based sports. More advanced concepts such as plyometrics, which incorporate explosive movement, are introduced later. “So that no matter what sport you play, you’re going to be a better athlete at the end of the summer,” Forbes added.
Students will also work on resistive sprinting, which involves being tied to an object while sprinting. “It’s just enough resistance so that you can practice full-speed mechanics without actually going full speed,” Forbes said. “So it’s a safer way to do full speed mechanics, so you’re not worried about kids pulling hamstrings and that sort of thing.”
Another more advanced exercise is overspeed sprinting, comparable to running downhill. Forbes said these exercises teach students “the neuromuscular firing patterns to make their legs cycle faster, so it helps with speed development.”
The program also works on core strength exercises such as pushups and situps. Incoming Harker student Oisin Coveney, who will start grade 9 in the fall, found this part of the program to be his favorite. “You have to switch between each exercise very quickly without much of a break, and it’s actually more enjoyable because I know I’m getting better,” he said.
Coveney joined the program because he wanted to work on his speed and agility as a soccer player. “I’m not the fastest person on the field, and I’d like to step that up,” he said.
Forbes noted that many of the sports performance program’s students are in grades 6-8. To this he credits the program’s emphasis on developing overall athletes and not just preparing them for an upcoming season. “Most of these kids now, we’re not getting them ready for the season, we’re helping develop them into athletes at a younger age,” he said.
Other students, such as Naomi Molin, grade 9, simply enjoy the opportunity to get out and exercise in the summer weather: “It’s just a neat way to get out and do something active over the summer when it’s so easy to just stay inside and watch TV all day.”
Students have flocked again to the Oakwood Tennis Center for this year’s Harker tennis camp, which are open to students in grade 2-11 of nearly any skill level.
The two tennis programs, Harker Summer Tennis Camp (HSTC) and the Harker-Oakwood Tennis Training System (HOTTS), cover a wide range of skill levels and techniques. Harker tennis coach Craig Pasqua, certified by the United States Professional Tennis Association and a coach for 14 years, heads both programs.
With HSTC students, he said, “We want to teach them a sound fundamental base, although with a modern twist.” Beginners still learn the primary forehand, backhand, serve and volley strokes, but they are also introduced to some slightly more advanced concepts. “I start teaching the kids right away how to hit rotational forehands, rotational backhands as well as traditional forehand and backhand,” he said. “When I learned how to play, and all the coaches learned how to play, there was one method, and that was you took the racket back, you stepped into the shot and your weight propelled your momentum. Today most pros play differently. They don’t hit that way anymore. They use a more rotational, or angular, force.”
This technique, he said, creates more spin and is more effective at concealing the kinds of shots a player makes. It also makes it easier for younger players to hit balls that are hit above their heads.
At the intermediate level, students still concentrate on the basic skills, but also learn how to take better control of their muscle groups to get the most out of each hit, using what is known as the kinetic chain. “The better a tennis player you are, the more opportunities you have to develop and expand your kinetic chain,” Pasqua said. “You start by pushing against the ground when you hit a stroke, and you push up through your legs, certainly using your waist and your hips as you rotate and then eventually to your arm with the racket.”
The HOTTS program is meant for competitive players who wish to learn the more advanced aspects of tennis. “It’s a technical tactical and conditioning program for our up-and-coming competitive players. Many of our players already play tournaments,” Pasqua said. Students in this program train for actual in-game situations and participate in interclub matches. “We feel that realistic engagement is going to lead to better performance when they get in actual game situations.”
What’s important to Pasqua however, is that the students have fun and maintain a healthy respect for the game. Additionally, all of the coaches in the program have college degrees and have played at the college level. “The coaches are very respectful and very supportive of the players,” he said. “We don’t yell at any of the kids. We teach tennis how we want to be taught.”
Joshua Valluru, an incoming student who starts grade 5 in the fall, has enjoyed the camp so far, as much for its educational value as for the opportunity to make new friends. “It’s really fun because since I can socialize with the Harker students, I can get an idea what it’s going to be like when I enter fifth grade,” he said.
In accordance with the camp’s aims, Valluru said the most important thing he learned was “to have fun and not take the sport too seriously because you’re not going to become a good tennis player if you’re always under pressure, so I’ve learned that if you take the sport in a fun way then you’ll become better at it.”
This article was originally published in the summer 2012 Harker Quarterly.
The Harker Concert Series season came to a close on March 17 with a distinguished string quartet, who ran a master class with orchestra students and then performed to a full house in Nichols Hall auditorium.
The Afiara String Quartet is a Canadian group with impressive résumés: the foursome have degrees from Juilliard, Peabody, New England Conservatory, San Francisco Conservatory and Mannes College among them. Together the result is a tightly knit, focused yet relaxed ensemble that interprets music as though it were coming from just one bow.
In the hands of this quartet, Beethoven’s “String Quartet in F minor, Op. 95” was aggressive, passionate and full of extremes, just as one wants Beethoven to be. Violist David Samuel and cellist Adrian Fung had a chance to show off the rich sonorities they coaxed from their instruments, and the group bobbed and swayed in perfect physical harmony as they dug into the dramatic piece, executing flawless transitions between tempi and movements.
Next was a commissioned work by Samuel’s Juilliard buddy Brett Abigaña, a rising star in the classical world, and the piece seemed perfectly designed to highlight each player’s musicianship and virtuosity. The first movement was hauntingly beautiful, with a stunning dissonant ostinato provided by the two violinists, Valerie Li and Yuri Cho. The piece ended in a flurry of scalar passages, performed absolutely in sync and with clarity and precision that were truly spectacular. This piece was a wonderful mixture of modern atonality and lush melodies, and it was a treat to have such a positive glimpse of classical music’s future.
The Bohemian composer Dvorák is known for infusing his work with nationalistic folk songs, and it didn’t take much imagination to hear such themes in his string quartet, next on the program. The third distinct genre of the evening, this piece received the same flawless interpretation as the others, showing Afiara’s comfort with various styles.
It is truly a learning experience for students and the community alike to witness such a seamless meeting of the minds amongst members of a small ensemble like the Afiara String Quartet.
With summer temperatures on the rise, students in grades 4-8 headed to the Singh Aquatic Center at the upper school campus to learn about one of the more popular aquatic sports at this year’s summer water polo camp.
“The camp is basically one for fundamentals of water polo,” said coach Ted Ujifusa, who has been involved with water polo since 1964, and helped the University of California, Berkeley, win their first NCAA championship. “We want to talk about body movement in the form of a variety of different kicks that we use to move ourselves around, also just the mechanics involved in simply catching and throwing a ball.”
The camp started with the basics of the game, including movement, body positioning and passing. “We consider a shot to simply be a faster version of a pass, so we’re trying to work on good body positioning and mechanics right to begin with,” said Ujifusa.
Students later worked on shooting and how to guard members of the opposing team, as well as how to break free from defenders and deal with one-on-one situations against goalkeepers. The aim by the middle of the week was to have students build enough fundamental skills to begin playing games. “Really, we’re just playing a fancy game of keep-away, so it’s not rocket science,” Ujifusa said.
One student, Addith Srinivasan, who will start grade 6 in the fall, said the games were his favorite part of the camp, which he joined this year because he “just wanted to try out water polo.
“It’s really fun,” he said.
Samantha Yanovsky, also going on to grade 6, saw her siblings excel at water polo and decided to try it for herself, and enjoyed the camp, learning that “you need really big leg muscles because it’s going to get tiring.”
Boys in grades 4-8 attended Harker’s basketball camp the week of June 25 to learn the game’s fundamental skills. The camp was headed up by Butch Keller, upper school head, who has coached basketball at the high school and college levels for more than 25 years.
“Our goal is to hand [the students] skills and tools to make them better individually, so they understand the fundamentals of the game,” he said.
Each day of the program focused on a different skill, such as dribbling, passing and shooting. Harker varsity basketball players assisted the younger students with morning drills. “We had different stations set up and the kids went through the stations; each player was given to one of the older players, so they have a group of players that they’re responsible for and making sure they learn the fundamentals,” Keller said. “Everything we did during that day had as its emphasis the skill that we taught that morning.”
Students also played four-on-four games using the skills they learned, and also participated in schoolyard games such as Hotshot.
“The goal by the end of the week is to give the kids that are here skills that they can work on on their own,” Keller said. The program even taught the students drills that they could work on during commercial breaks while watching TV. “It’s all about things that they can do to improve their game at their age,” Keller added.
Jarrett Anderson, starting grade 6 in the fall, thought attending the basketball camp was a “great idea” because he wanted “more experience.” He believed dribbling was one of the most important things he learned.
“I like sports, and basketball’s a fun sport,” said Brandon Coulter, who starts grade 4 in the fall, of his reasons for joining the camp this year. He enjoyed the camp and said shooting was a skill he felt the camp helped him to improve.
The bottom line for Keller was to equip the students with what they need to become better individual players. “If they’re here to get better, they can take everything that we teach them, and they can do it on their own,” he said.
Young soccer enthusiasts in grades 5-12 once again flocked to the upper school campus for Harker’s yearly summer soccer camp. Players of all skill levels found something to enjoy about the program, which just finished up its second week.
Coach Shaun Tsakiris, who won an NCAA national championship with UCLA in 1997 and received an MVP award from that university in 2000, says Harker’s approach is unique among soccer camps. “We do different stations of psycho-motor skills, which is either juggling, balance, coordination or agility. We incorporate passing and receiving in part of our warmups,” he said.
Throughout each day of the camp, different stations are set up to allow students to work on different skills. “We rotate the kids so we make sure that each kid has a topic every day,” Tsakiris said. Each station has a coach dedicated to helping students improve a skill, be it shooting, passing, futsal (indoor soccer), one-versus-one matchups or dribbling.
“We have coaches who have either played at the highest level or coached at a very high level, and I think that we have a lot of energy with the kids,” Tsakiris said, adding that it is important to him that students have fun and learn at the same time. “We make it fun, but we make sure that it’s not just day care, that this is a soccer camp where kids are leaving knowing that they learned something.”
Harker student Jeffrey Hanke, who starts grade 11 in the fall, said the soccer camp is a “good way to train and get ready for next season,” and has been a good opportunity for him to improve his shooting techniques. Alan Guo, entering grade 10 in the fall, is now attending his third summer soccer camp. “I can improve while still having fun,” he said.
At the end of each week, students receive awards for their efforts at the camp. Awards are based less on ability and more on hard work, improvement, teamwork and attitude. “Things like that are very important for us,” Tsakiris said.
Each week also ends with an appearance by a guest speaker. The first week of the program featured an appearance by Aly Wagner, a former professional soccer midfielder who played for Women’s Professional Soccer and was a member of the United States women’s national soccer team.
According to Tsakiris, the hard work that the coaching staff and the students have put in has evidently paid off: “The fact that we keep getting more and more kids every week I think says quite a bit.”