New ballgame

Christina Izzicupo is in uncharted territory. A three-sport athlete set to enter her senior year at Stoneham High School, she was competing at the USA Junior Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Indianapolis recently when she learned her town had rejected a $3 million property tax override.

"At first I didn't really understand what it meant," said Izzicupo.

"Then my coach and my parents said, 'There's no sports in Stoneham right now.' And I was like, 'Oh, my god.' . . . I don't even know what to say. I need sports in my life."

After the override failed, the School Committee called for the elimination of high school sports but is now backtracking from its plans. Even so, the move has generated considerable uncertainty at the high school, where 70 percent of students participate in athletics at some point in their high school careers, and has also thrown a spotlight on the success of Stoneham's athletic programs.

The school has a rich athletic history, one that includes numerous state champions, including Izzicupo's girls' indoor track team this winter and the boys' soccer state championship teams in 2004 and 2005, notable athletes such as professional baseball players Joe Vitiello and Pete Fisher, along with Joe McLaughlin, who played six seasons in the National Football League.

"We've just started an athletic hall of fame [in 2003], and I see the pride in town," said Michael Lahiff, the school's 13-year athletic director who recently accepted a similar post at Middlesex League rival Watertown High.

The fourth class of inductees, which will include Olympic figure skating silver medalist Nancy Kerrigan, will be honored next spring.

"It's been a great experience for me, meeting some of the former athletes coming back after they've been inducted. We've had some kids that have done very well," Lahiff said.

Vitiello, Fisher, and Kristen Seabury were all full -scholarship athletes at the University of Alabama. Vitiello was a first-round pick of the Kansas City Royals in the 1991 draft and Fisher a fourth-round selection by the Minnesota Twins in 1998. Seabury was an all-SEC runner at Alabama and competed in the 1992 and 1996 Olympic Trials.

Her father, Bill, a 1961 Stoneham graduate who was inducted into the school's athletic hall of fame in 2006 for his prowess on the playing field (hockey, baseball), coached the Spartans to the Division 2 state baseball title in 1995.

The school's hall of fame representation spans the years from 1931, with Herant John Adzigian, who played football, basketball, and baseball, through 1995, with Bill Seabury's championship baseball squad.

"It's a great history," said Joe McLaughlin, who graduated from Stoneham in 1975 and was inducted into the school's athletic hall of fame in 2004. "We had a lot of great teams. I don't know if it was the winning or the losing. It was just we had some great coaches, great people, all the people who put in their time.

"It's just unfortunate," he said of the threatened cuts. "It's part of the high school experience, the different sports, band. There's a lot more to high school than just classes."

Many see the effects of the cuts extending beyond school walls, eroding the sense of community pride. "Not only would it jeopardize school spirit overall and the sense of community and environment in the school structure, we all know sports is something the entire school, athlete or nonathlete, seems to come together for," said Stacey Sullivan, a three-sport star who graduated in 1995 with a softball scholarship to the University of Maine after helping the Spartans to the Division 2 North softball championship. She just completed her second season as head coach of Maine's softball team.

Elementary arts and music programs also were targeted for cuts by the School Committee, which is backing away from its plans after the Board of Selectmen passed a trash fee to raise money for the town and school budgets.

"Even the arts and music programs have a great tradition at Stoneham," Sullivan said.

"The sense of environment, community would be eliminated. But also I think we would lose a lot of kids to private schools because they need a place to play. And then what that does is take the kids out of the community, and then we lose that whole passion for our hometown."

What do you think?
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