When Berlin High School baseball coach Leo Veleas was looking for an assistant coach in 1990, Frank Naples just showed up. “I didn’t know he wanted to be a coach,“ Veleas said. “I just knew him as an athlete.”
Jim Barnes had just retired from his position with an insurance corporation in 2009 during his daughter Erica’s senior season with the Berlin High School girls golf team.
A driving range, which was located less than a mile from Julia Kemmling’s home, is an abandoned grassy field adjoining an industrial park on the Berlin Turnpike today. Though the range has vanished, memories remain.
Competitors in the 55-meters race in the 2006 Class M state indoor meet in New Haven were getting settled in their starting blocks. That’s when Berlin High School sophomore Jaime Rasmussen Flotre found herself next to defending champion senior Sashuana Stewart of Weaver High-Hartford.
These 14–15-year-olds were prodigies of the first order. “It started when we were in Little League,” Kyle Cooney said. “We grew up together and were known as the ‘Dirty Dozen.’ ”
Kyle Vazquez didn’t just play on Berlin High School’s Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference championship baseball and basketball teams; he shined in the preeminent contests of those seasons.
Those 1947-48 Berlin High School football teams looked like all other football teams of the era: leather helmets, no faceguards, almost no passing plays and wool jerseys. It was Wing-T and Single-Wing for offense and quick, bulldog lines.
Alexys Vazquez, sitting in the back seat of the family car, often was on her phone in search of an open fitness center basketball court, so later she could shoot some three-pointers, while older brother Kyle played baseball.
When an umpire was giving sophomore pitcher Sean Johnston a hard time, Veleas said, “Stop yelling at my player,” Johnston recalled.
Tony Legnani learned about Bob Johnson from newspaper clippings his mother had sent him, while he was on active duty in Okinawa.
After playing youth soccer for several years, Catherine Voelpel was hesitant to take up a new sport, running.
Amy Bordonaro Collins is a two-fer, a double-dose of athletic and academic excellence.
Jason Pires says Brittany Labbadia is on his “Mount Rushmore” of softball players he has coached at Berlin High School.
Berlin High School girls golf coach Jim Barnes looked out from the boisterous bus as it approached the Timberlin Golf Course clubhouse, after the team had won its first CIAC state championship in 2011.
Early in the 1999 baseball season the team was demolishing the opposition.
Adela Sarra McLaughlin's advocacy for girls' athletics was laudatory throughout her almost 40 years as an educator, coach and athletic administrator in the Berlin school system.
Aldo Zovich was a freshman at Berlin High School in 1976 when he went out for the first wrestling team in school history.
Anthony Marzi was an established pitcher on the UConn baseball team in 2013.
Olson said participating in the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials and setting the 1979 NCAA Division II hammer record were his most memorable sports achievements.
Meagan Guy was a basketball and softball captain as a junior and a senior and a volleyball captain her senior season at Berlin High School.
Latest NewsKurt Lavoie2024-04-17T14:17:51+00:00