So long to the 2018-19 season
author: nathan mccarville | sports writer
Arthur Ward / Shoutout to the volleyball team being the most improved Cougars team
A strong development year for the Cougars
Another line of starting fifth–years end their USPORTS eligibility , often moving on from their sports after graduation. The Cougars will be saying goodbye to fourteen of their fifth–year athletes including one player from the men’s basketball team, Kornél Tökölyi, one from the women’s hockey team, Emma Waldenberger, an athlete from the track and field team, Marc Turmel, a few from the soccer team including Angela Lalonde, Ashton Lowry, Nikita Sneko, and Brianna Wright, four athletes from the volleyball team, Taylor Ungar, Ashlee Sandiford, Satomi Tagawa, and Leah Swanyk, Two rams including Ben Lane and Robbie Avram, and even an athlete from the women’s basketball team, Christina McCusker.
As the veterans leave their team’s starting lines, they are replenished by budding third– and fourth–years taking the leadership roles and first year recruits to replenishing their numbers as prospects and commitments continue pour in, providing much needed players to the teams.
Each sporting season had its merits, each team putting on a fantastically entertaining show of athleticism in their own trained and skillful discipline. Medals were won and lost, a couple teams dissolved, and titles were attained with their banners hung in the gym for the coming years to see as long as the fabric holds.
With such a wrap–up comes the ceremonies for such, granting the accolades to the deserving student athletes and sending them off to either the professional realm to use their degrees or go onto another decade or so of professional athleticism like a few of this year’s graduating Cougars and Rams. And intramural celebrations like the much loved and yearly held Futsal Cup, just finishing this past weekend, or the widespread volleyball and basketball championships that had been occurring nearly every Wednesday evening for the past few months.
This time of year also brings thoughts of the pre-season where every team is beginning their training camps and ramping up for the upcoming regular seasons coming quickly in the fall where yet another generation of fifth years and first years can have their biggest season yet as they develop as athletes in the University of Regina’s primo athletic program.
Though the year brought many stories to tell, with high scores, records broken, downfalls and forfeits, the year has become a part of the Cougars athletic history, to be looked back on and admired for something that was accomplished rather than something that is happening, something to base expectations on for the current season for a player to either disappoint, play on par, or exceed all expectations in the coming season with new lines and new rosters will take over.
