Beacon Middle School athletes ready to be coached up
“God bless you. You make me feel brand new.” - The Stylistics
Middle school sports tryouts at Beacon Middle School are held in the late afternoon of the week before the doors open for class. New coaches and players melt and mingle with the experienced; the process is energizing, but as excitement looms on the horizon, so does disappointment.
Popular programs like soccer and volleyball with close to 60 kids at tryouts just have to cut people, and that isn’t fun for anyone.
The biggest change at Beacon is field hockey, where Patti Jo Mock retired as the only coach the school has ever known. Patti Jo maybe lost a game and tied one at Beacon, but she would absolutely never talk about it.
The relentlessly energetic and positive all day long Dom Scott has stepped into the Beacon field hockey job. Dom played at Cape and then East Stroudsburg University and, most recently, coached for Delaware Shore.
Julie Bernheimer is still helping out, as are Lisa Kammerer and Brittany Bailey. The numbers for hockey are down, an inverse correlation to the staggeringly high numbers for volleyball.
Adam Kindle and Dion Lamb are back coaching volleyball, facing a 10-game schedule, and, hopefully, other schools will have enough depth to play an A and B game like Beacon.
Football finds Haywood Burton and John Currie back coaching the team, and they ran the boys pretty hard the first few days up and down a hill and through ditches named Leslie. “Guys now in college remember Leslie,” said coach Burton.
Football will scrimmage Milford Thursday, Sept. 8, then open the season Thursday, Sept. 22, away against Tim Clausen’s Selbyville squad.
Soccer, under coaches Justin Vorhees and Bill Bennett, opened up tryouts by putting players through some endurance running before transitioning to ball skills.
Beacon was 6-3-2 last fall in the tough Henlopen Conference, with Georgetown the current powerhouse.
A bunch of “Betcha by golly, wow” moments await these young athletes of promise this fall. Have fun out there. Just don’t expect to be happy all the time.
Note: Coaches are encouraged to enter scores and stats on www.websites4sports.com the same day the game is played.
