As of this year, there is officially a Winchester Thurston varsity girl’s soccer team. Led by coaches Parus Nischal and Lynn Horton, the team started out its season with a 6-2 win against Carrick High School. The Bears have started their season with 7 wins and 2 losses, and together have scored 33 goals, an impressive 21 of which have been scored by freshman Katie Kunkle. “‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’-Wayne Gretzky” says sophomore AJ Molder. The current seniors on the team, Cherisse Tompkins, Adero Kauffmann-Okoko, Isabel Slaymaker, Roshni Nischal, Sabrina Evoy, and Ella Rosenblatt, were a major contributing factor to the start of the girls’ soccer team. Not only did they fight to create a strong and successful team, but they encouraged others and created more opportunities for female athletes at WT.

Other players on the team include Hannah Kwiecinski, Kate Chaillet, Katibeth Blalock, Kayla Zemek, AJ Molder, Sienna Blelloch, Sydney Gray, Tatiana Barelli, Sophia Scheatzle, and Katie Kunkle. New members of the team were welcomed with open arms. Each teammate is encouraged and supported on and off the field and is pushed to develop as a player, friend, and teammate. “What has made this experience so special to many of us,” explained Sabrina Evoy, “ has been the fact that we’ve worked not only to win our games like all the other teams, but we’ve had to work just to have a team to begin with. So the payoff has felt like a personal triumph.” The girls varsity soccer team has thrived this year and hopes to continue to thrive in future years. The team’s success has been astonishing, and none of it would have been possible without the help and support of our coaches.