The buzzer blared, and the game ended, and a crestfallen Ben Nematadzira staggered off the field alongside his teammates, their season over. Nematadzira, a junior forward on the boys soccer team, had scored his eighth goal of the season early in the second half of this Group 4 semifinal, buoying the sinking Blue Devils. But Westfield had ultimately fallen short, 3-1.
The next day, Nematadzira was in the pool.
Swim season beckoned.
“I just couldn’t stay in the house, and I knew that we had a swim practice,” he says. “So I decided to get in.”
Nematadzira swapped his trademark bandana for a swim cap, his soccer shorts for a bathing suit. The transition between sports may seem abrupt, a quick pivot, but there remain a number of Westfield athletes like Nematadzira who shift from fall to winter sports with the speed of an actor slipping into character.
High school sports can be exacting, but even with the rapid transition, these athletes relish playing multiple sports.
“At the end of field hockey, it’s rewarding to see how the season has progressed and how far we’ve gone,” says Erin Doherty, a junior who also plays basketball and softball. “So to go into another season, I want to do the same thing over again.”
Still, the quick turnaround is trying. A high school season commands upwards of 10 hours a week, sometimes far more. For months, an athlete can immerse themself in one sport, practicing, playing games, watching film, the whole catalog.
Then, in a day, they flip to the next sport.
“When you don’t swim for a long time, you can ask any swimmer, it’s hard to get back in,” Nematadzira says. “Those first few practices are really hitting.”
The acclimatization period is rapid, an intense battle to regain old skills and adjust to the rhythms of a different sport. The shift can be jarring. Some athletes enter totally different habitats when they switch sports, like shifting climates from desert to rainforest.
“Just a different environment,” says senior Gabe Dayon, who sheds his football pads for bowling shoes. He adds that bowling is “you versus an object, not a person versus another person.”
Different athletes possess different philosophies about how to prevent rustiness. Dayon bowled once or twice a month during football season, “just to keep the flow of it.” Nematadzira swam frequently over the summer but stopped his trips to the pool once soccer intensified. Doherty practiced basketball on weekends during field hockey season—while playing a full club softball schedule. Sutton Factor, a senior who switches from soccer to basketball, barely touched a basketball all fall.
Winter coaches accept that it takes time to adapt.
“Obviously their skill set will be a little rusty,” says girls basketball coach Liz McKeon, whose roster contains a few multi-sport athletes. She pinpoints shooting and dribbling as areas where basketball players transitioning from a fall sport often require time to acclimate. But, McKeon adds, the mental transition is seamless.
“Their intensity, their mental preparation, knowing the X’s and O’s and what to do, what spot to go to in those types of drills—they’re already in that mindset,” she says. “In my opinion, it’s an easy transition. It doesn’t matter what sport it is, you’re already focused in that team mentality.”
Factor perhaps epitomizes multi-sport success. The girls soccer and basketball teams each won a Group 4 state championship last year. The common denominator? Sutton Factor. A goalkeeper, she anchored the soccer team’s back line, then turned around and helped pilot the basketball team to victory.
“I feel like I have a similar role leadership-wise in basketball and soccer, so it’s not hard changing my nature in that sense,” Factor says.
Or, as McKeon puts it: “Sutton goes from yelling on the soccer field to [yelling on] the basketball court. Very seamless.”
Other athletes agree. Dayon says he translates the ability to refocus from football to bowling. A missed blocking assignment in football, a bad game in bowling—both are things he must forget about and move on from.
But despite the smooth mental transition, multi-sport athletes acknowledge that they enter the winter season at a physical disadvantage. It is an unshakable component of the multi-sport life.
As youth sports intensify and morph into year-round commitments, young athletes often face pressure to specialize. And many do. Those who devote time to secondary sports, the thinking goes, risk lagging behind their peers.
One of Factor’s coaches once told her that “there’s no such thing as a Renaissance man anymore.” Nematadzira’s club soccer coaches have pressured him to stop swimming. Doherty is “constantly” told she should drop a sport.
But despite the pressure, they all stick with their sports, and they all believe in their ability to recover from the rustiness induced by toggling between sports. Some might deem it a handicap, to play multiple sports; these athletes consider it an asset, a privilege.
At the end of the day, it’s about loving the game, loving the team aspect, loving the atmosphere. Loving sports.
“I don’t just [play sports] for myself or for my own advantage,” Nematadzira says. “I do it for the people around me and the friends that I’ve made throughout high school. And once you play a team sport in high school, you can just feel the love from the people around you, and it makes you want to keep going.”
