Now that fall sports have officially wrapped up, the school and everyone in it is transitioning to winter. With that transition comes high school winter sports. With the sports starting up for this 2025-2026 season, there is also the factor of the planning and preparation of the winter season, which brings in the factor of preseason activities. Briar Wood high school winter sports include basketball, swim, wrestling, indoor track, winter cheer, and gymnastics. 

First to dive into swimming and indoor track, and how those sports prepared for their winter season. Swim in particular don’t have so much preparation to do for the athlete side, Avery Sexton, previous varsity swim athlete states that “the only thing that swim athletes do before the season start is go to the annual swim meeting.” In this meeting the coaches and staff see how many interested athletes plan on trying out for swim, and to calculate the number of athletes planning on joining the swim team. This interest meeting shows that the athlete is interested in swim, this helps the coaches with planning of the swim season, since numbers can vary. Indoor track on the other hand has cross country to prepare for indoor track in the winter, this is a great way to see returning cross country athletes from the fall return and continue their career by participating in indoor track. 

Next to continue with behind the scenes of winter cheer and gymnastics. Gymnastics truly depends on the year, some years the number of girls trying out are a lot, some are very little. The effect of this causes gymnastics to some years have a team and others just do not exist. This year because of the turnout Briar woods will in fact have a gymnastics team. During the fall season the gymnastic coaches held an interesting meeting to even see if they would have enough girls to form a team, after recording the numbers they have concluded into having a team this year.  Winter cheer on the other hand is a way to keep the state championship winning team warm. The preseason to winter cheer, is regular fall seasonal cheer. 

Lastly the two winter sports remaining are the ones with the most preseason prep and activities. Basketball and wrestling take so much planning and time to be a part of. Basketball is by far the most complicated preseason activity. Officially the girls basketball preseason “started way back in July and lasted until the end of October.” Stated freshman Sofia Gaudio. Preseason looked like open gyms, which are practice opportunities in front of the coaches, and conditioning.  Attending these events were important since this was an opportunity for coaches to see the players’ dedications and efforts, also seeing their skill. This was no different for the boy basketball team, just the only difference was that they did practice in the mornings before school had started and sometimes when the volleyball team had away games. All of these activities for basketball happened throughout the fall season sports. Wrestling is no different than having wrestling gyms and training during the duration of fall season. These two sports are the biggest sports to have such a long preseason for winter and also the importance of the preseason. 

In conclusion, preseason sports are such a big factor that play into the winter season for many different reasons stated in the article. Attending these preseason events not only benefit the players but also play into how the season and teams would go. Both coaches and athletes benefit greatly from these activities, some need a longer preseason, some shorter, regardless of how long preseason is such an important and major factor for winter sports, and is something that all sports do have.