When it comes to winter sports, people tend to think of basketball. Students pack the bleachers in the gym to cheer on the boy’s and girl’s teams twice a week. 

Although basketball is a competitive sport at BVN, there are a variety of other sports that students believe deserve more attention. Two of these sports are Boys’ Swim and Dive, and Boy’s and Girl’s Wrestling.

All of these sports are a lot more individualized where individual success leads to team success and downfalls can also lead to the team’s downfalls

Junior Wrestler Wesley Dubreuil discussed the ins and outs of the wrestling team.

“Wrestling works like the track. There is a varsity and JV team and they both go to different meets and teams win tournaments by having the most points which come from their wrestler’s combined points.”

Similar to swim and dive, wrestling is scored based on individual wrestlers’ matches which contribute to the overall scoring of the team.

Sophomore Trey Wichman expressed how he wishes the BVN dive Team would receive more support from BVN students.

“I believe our dive team could have gotten more attention. I mean it’s not going to get as much attention as basketball,” Wichman said. “ It would be nice to get some people there and hype it up.”

Wichman believes that the dive team puts in a large amount of time and effort into their sport, and would like to see more students appreciate the sport.

Dubreuil also thinks that his sport deserves more appreciation and attention from the student body.

“I don’t think our sport gets enough attention although it’s very widespread and is growing steadily. I feel that if we got more attention it could help a lot of people to find a new sport that they might end up loving,” Dubreuil said. “The school doesn’t support us very much and even if we had people come to our home meets that would mean a lot to the team.”  

Another problem a lot of smaller sports face is budget. Sports that are less popular tend to have lower budgets. This lack of budget can cause a lot of problems for certain sports including not being able to provide what coaches would consider an adequate amount of equipment to their athletes because it is not included in the budget.

“We don’t get enough funding because we have a very small wrestling room and very little equipment even compared to other Blue Valley schools. Especially this year, we have a lot more people than in the past and if we keep growing we will run out of space very fast,” Dubreuil said.

These athletes hope that in the future their sports will receive more appreciation.