When sports teams begin practicing or having scrimmages before their regular season, it shows them the things they need to fix before the real season begins. The preparation made during these games is crucial to the team’s performance during the season, but whether or not they should be required is a more difficult thing to evaluate. Sports teams should get highly involved in preseason activities such as scrimmages against other teams or at the very least, against each other.

Even though these games massively impact a team’s performance, preseason match-ups have seem to be overlooked to some sports teams especially JV levels. Last year only a handful of JV teams participated in preseason athletics including: football, volleyball (girls), and soccer. Out of 11 sports the ratio is very imbalanced, considering almost all varsity teams have preseason games/practices. Although there is a summer league for water polo, football, baseball, and girls volleyball, there is still a gap between summer and when the league actually begins where teams can lose the progress they’ve made.

This can be quite concerning for Lugo athletics. Frosh/JV are important to focus on because it is the foundation to how players get developed into a varsity player. So it makes sense to say that JV should earn the right to participate in preseason games, right? Not really according to a few coaches as they “don’t really mind” not having JV play preseason. There hasn’t been a definite answer, but according to varsity basketball coach Steven DeLeon, he believes that JV players can improve throughout the regular season.

However, Jv players seem to think otherwise. According to a survey of “soon to be” JV players who were asked if they should participate in preseason games/practices, 16 out of 20 said there should be a preseason before the regular season. One student-athlete who shall remain anonymous, even stated, “we have to stay prepared if we want to get better and not sit on our a–.”

Most kid’s sole form of physical activity is the sport they play at school, and in order to play at a sufficient level they need to stay in shape.Preseason games develop team chemistry as well which is also really important to performance, however not having a preseason before can make maintaining the chemistry hard.

In the future we hope that all teams of all levels can participate in a preseason for the sake of the future of Don Lugo sports. We all see how varsity performs with these pre-games so just think about how Frosh and JV could improve as well. The lower levels are the future of our sports programs, and its time they are shown the same amount of effort that goes into Varsity.