The most well-known sports at AHS are typically located on courts and fields, with large student sections and significant recognition. While AHS offers a wide range of CHSAA-sponsored sports, non-CHSAA activities are equally important to many students at our school. While the participants in these activities have abundant passion and put in vast effort, they do not always receive the attention they deserve. These include, but are not limited to girls’ hockey, figure skating, climbing, and robotics.

Girls’ Hockey

The Aspen Leafs girls’ hockey team is made up of students from all around the valley, but primarily consists of AHS students. The team practices and plays home games at the Lewis Ice Arena, and have a 6-5 record at the time of print. The girls mainly play teams in the Colorado Girls’ Hockey League from Steamboat, Vail, and Denver in games and tournaments, which fosters a close-bonded community across the different teams. AHS junior Emma-Jane Mallory has been playing hockey for four years and is a member of the U19 division. The tight-knit group that hockey provides is something that motivates Mallory and the rest of her teammates to succeed.

“We have tournaments every weekend and have pretty small competition. We’re very competitive, and we have gone to states in past years, and are hoping to win it this year,” Mallory said. “It’s not many girls that play hockey, so it’s a very big community full of love, which drives all of us.”

While the team is strong, Title IX regulations prevent it from being recognized as an official school sport, as they require equal participation opportunities for both men and women. Because of this, the girls don’t receive varsity letters, high game attendance, or much acknowledgement. Mallory strives for more recognition from the student body and school officials.

“We represent the school, and almost all the girls are from the high school itself. We don’t get any appreciation, no one wants to watch our games or anything, so it’s annoying,” Mallory said. “[We] don’t even need to be part of the school, but just for people to show up to our games.”

Mallory encourages people to show up to support the team in any way they can, whether it’s by attending games, spreading the word about the team, or capturing photos. Furthermore, Mallory believes that people who make the effort to attend games will dispel any negative misconceptions they have about girls’ hockey that have held them back previously.

Ultimately, being a member of girls’ hockey and holding a leadership position on top of that has taught Mallory to never give up and to continue to love what she’s passionate about.

“Hockey has shown me how to step up, even in school. It really teaches me to keep trying because very few people respect girls, so we work for everything we have,” Mallory said.

Skating

Tucked away at the ARC and the Aspen Ice Garden, many ASD students participate in figure skating. Run by the Aspen Skating Club (ASC), students of all ages are able to learn to skate, compete, and perform in shows. ASC is independent and therefore not considered an AHS sport. The competitions offered by theSkating Club are optional competitions, as the club is mainly focused on their winter and spring shows. AHS junior Elizabeth Flynn has been skating since she was very young and is still a member of the ASC. As a result of her experience with the club, she has skated in many such shows.

“There are usually two Christmas shows, which are performed over Christmas break, either at CP Burger or at the rink in Snowmass for tourists to come watch, and then we do a spring show in March that is at the ARC,” Flynn said.

The ASC is enjoyable for Flynn, as she says that she enjoys spending time with her teammates and friends, and also believes that her coach makes skating fun. Flynn also thinks that skating is rewarding when you succeed after many hard hours of preparation.

Since the ASC is not sponsored by the school, Flynn believes some students are unaware of Aspen’s figure skating program. However, she believes students respect skaters and understand the difficulty of the sport, and she encourages them to attend the ASC’s spring show at the ARC in March.

Finally, because the sport is not sponsored by the school or CHSAA, skaters often see their hard work go unrecognized.

“It’s annoying that we can’t earn varsity letters for doing the same amount of work as people in other sports,” Flynn said.

Climbing

While many AHS athletes are used to intense practices on fields or courts, a sport that is “high” intensity in a literal sense is the AHS climbing team. The team practices twice a week in the heart of our district, either at the climbing wall in the middle school or high school, and is open to people of any grade or skill level. Climbing is a technical sport that focuses on individual progression through “projects”, which are climbing routes people are tasked to complete. While the team does compete against other schools, the sport is highly collaborative, and everyone puts in an effort to encourage each other and offer advice.

“Of course, every school wants to win, but people are also out there helping each other, and everyone just wants to see each other grow,” AHS senior Bobby Lizotte said.

Lizotte has been climbing his whole life, and has become more serious about it over the last three years. This year is his first year as an official member of the climbing team. He enjoys the sport because of the endless support and encouragement everyone has for each other. Lizotte is also a member of AHS’s lacrosse team, one of the more well-known sports at the school, yet climbing stands out to him as a sport that will remain timeless post-high school. Though climbing is a club sport and slightly more casual, Lizotte states that everyone on the team enjoys climbing even more because of this.

“You graduate college, and you can’t really play [other sports] anymore…but climbing, you can have as a hobby to stay healthy for the rest of your life,” Lizotte said. “I think it would be great if CHSAA made it a point to grow the sport a bit for that reason.”

Additionally, the climbing team offers an opportunity for people across different sports and hobbies to connect through technical skill. It teaches the members resilience, patience, and how to be more accepting of others from different backgrounds.

“Through climbing, I’ve grown and stepped out of my comfort zone by becoming friends and talking to people outside of those who I normally interact with,” Lizotte said. “Accomplishing hard routes with the people I’ve met is one of the most rewarding feelings from any sport I’ve ever played.”

Robotics

Finally, the Robo Yetis, AHS’s First Tech Challenge robotics team, offers students the ability to build and program a robot. The Robo Yetis are a club at AHS and are open to any interested students. The club ventures to various competitions across the state to compete against other schools’ robots. Ultimately, each robot completes a series of tasks in two and a half minutes in hopes of emerging victorious. AHS junior Zach Grieper has been a member of the Robo Yetis for three years, and says that the format of FTC competitions is slightly unusual.

“You’re paired up with a random team, and you’re put into the blue alliance, and then two other teams are paired up randomly and put into the red alliance, and then the blue and red, obviously, work against each other for that one round. Then they jumble up those pairings in the alliances,” Greiper said, “So for one round, you could be working with one team, and in the next round you might be working against that same team.”

After the preliminary rounds, the top-ranked teams may move on to the “endgame” phase of the competition to compete for podium positions.

“The finalists, so the top four teams get to choose an alliance partner, and then there are five more rounds after that where you stay with that chosen alliance partner. Whoever wins all those matches or the most of those matches wins the whole tournament,” Greiper said.

Greiper says he is very passionate about the club, and believes that in the school, robotics is not underappreciated, but rather underrecognized.

“I think people have an appreciation for [robotics], they just don’t know about it.
Just because it’s a smaller team. It doesn’t have a huge impact. You’re not going to watch a robotics competition. I think people respect it. They just don’t know about it,” Greiper said.

Grieper also feels that robotics is misunderstood. Some people may think that the Robo Yetis just sit around a computer building a small robot, but in reality, the club is much more hands-on. The robot is constructed using custom parts that must then be put together by the members of the club, and is coded using Java. According to Greiper, the entire process is very time-consuming, but the most rewarding part is when everything comes together.

As a part of the First Tech Challenge, Griper says that the team is required to do outreach. Although the Yetis frequently engage with students from AMS, Greiper says the team is looking to do more outreach within the high school.

“I’ve always wanted to just bring the robot to the commons and let people drive and shoot balls or whatever the function is for that year. I think hosting that would be pretty fun, just allowing people to see more of our process and design,” Greiper said.