by Emilia Ciesla (she/her)

People at KRHS love viewing a wide variety of winter sports, such as basketball or hockey. Alpine and nordic skiing are two other well-known sports in our New England region that are highly well-liked among our peers. Wintertime events within our school walls include wrestling matches and indoor track meets. In the Colby-Sawyer College pool, we can also meet with the swim team, which is, most importantly, the focus of this piece.

Our Kearsarge Swim Team, which consists of 8 Kearsarge kids and 3 students from different schools; twin brothers from Sunapee, and a long-distance swimmer from Hopkinton practices regularly at the Colby-Sawyer campus. Although sessions might be difficult to get through sometimes, our two excellent coaches, Emily Fougere and Signe Linville, keep the team motivated and always want the best for all of us. They help the team develop every day. Among many seniors in our team, Maggie Ellison is the captain for the 2022-2023 season. She maintains the Kearsarge Spirit!

The first competition went really well; it was held at home, and our swimmates qualified seven swims, which is exceptional considering how many other teams competed. Many of us have been swimming for a very long time, and that team surely fuels our enthusiasm. You are welcome to watch the next swimming competitions taking place in the Colby-Sawyer pool!

by Bonita Zorrilla (she/her)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I heard about it first from some of my friends that had read it and they suggested it to me. I decided to buy it shortly after and finished it in about a week.

The story starts with a woman, in her mid-30s, named Monique Grant. Monique is a writer for a magazine company and is currently going through a divorce, when 50s Hollywood international star, Evelyn Hugo, requests to have Monique write an article about her. Monique meets with Evelyn, only to find out that Evelyn actually wants Monique to write her biography for her instead. Hesitantly, Monique agrees and the two women meet up for weeks. Evelyn takes Monique through her entire life: the beginning, the movies, the drama and the seven husbands throughout it all. In the end, they discover painful secrets but also grow close and learn a lot from one another.

This has definitely become one of my favorites books. The characters and their problems are easy to understand and relate to, especially Evelyn Hugo. The storyline and plot twists are also shocking and done really well. I love how the story progresses and how each character grows towards the end. Although, one thing about this book that I didn’t like is that it was a little boring and hard to get into at first. But after the first few chapters, it gets so much better! I would rate this book 8/10 and would definitely recommend it to anyone that likes period dramas/romances. In the future, I’m definitely going to re-read this book. If you’re interested in reading this book or other books by Taylor Jenkins Reid , you can go to her website here!

by Megan Lizotte (she/her)

This is our second year of volleyball, so for the most part, we knew what to expect. The beginning of the season started with the basics again, since we aren’t a well established team. Quite a few people left from last year, but quite a few stayed as well. Some freshmen joined the team, this allowed us to have a big enough team to split in half. This time we’re having a junior varsity (JV) and a varsity team. The start of our season went very well, we all had high expectations. Shortly after the first few games people started dropping left and right, although luckily it wasn’t too many and our numbers stayed solid after a little bit.

When the news reached us that we were to have a scrimmage with Hanover High School, who are a decent team, our spirits soared in excitement. Since around half of us had never played before, our coach put in the people from last year for both JV and varsity. We won the match against JV, but lost to varsity. The loss didn’t matter as we’d beat their JV, and it was our first game. We thought that this would mean our season would be great, but alas, we couldn’t even win a set. Our mood would go down as the other teams started getting ahead by ten points, and we’d enter the mindset of it’s already over. Our coach always believed in us but her emotions affected us, so if she was down the team was as well. However, we had some close sets and high energy games that gave us hope. And then. Our last game. We FINALLY won our first set. The rest of the game didn’t matter to us, even though we lost, we were so excited to have won something. 

We always had so much energy after games that I found it odd we didn’t have any energy during most of them. I believe it’s because so much pressure was put on us, and we still didn’t know how to act as a team when the other teams had chants and were screaming at the top of their lungs. In the end, our coach had high expectations for us when it was only our second year as a team, first year with a varsity, but we did do better than everyone thought we would do, however we were still relatively new and needed a lot more guidance than we had as a new team. Our coach is a nurse and this is her first experience coaching, so she is exhausted during practice from working beforehand. This time we had a JV coach who’s a senior in college, so he couldn't attend our away games and some of our practices, but he is an awesome coach and a great addition to the team, he helped everyone a lot. I don’t think we were ready for varsity, seeing it was our second year as a team. All in all, while our season could have been better, it was still a good experience.

by Makenna Ellis (she/her)

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, is set in a small town called Maycomb, Alabama, from 1933-1935, and throughout the chapters, it tells the story of the Finch family.

The Radley place, a creepy house in the sleepy town of Maycomb - where the infamous Boo Radley supposedly lives - catches the eye of Dill, a friend who visits Jem and Scout that summer. From then on, Jem and Scout have an inexplicable fascination about the house, and the man behind the door.

Atticus, Scout and Jem’s father, is an important lawyer in Maycomb, and when a Black man named Tom Robinson is accused of committing a crime against a young white girl, Atticus agrees to defend him. Because of this, Jem and Scout are harassed in and outside of school. No one thinks it’s a good idea for Atticus to defend a Black man, not even the people in their own family. To Kill a Mockingbird is a story about family, prejudice and doing the right thing even when it’s hard.

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the world’s most well-known books and has sold more than 40 million copies since its publication in 1960. The novel has been in people’s homes, libraries, and schools for many years. In 2018, Harper Lee’s classic book was voted as “the best book of the last 125 years” by the PBS Great American Read.

However, some people have a different view of To Kill A Mockingbird. Since its initial publication, numerous people have fought to get this notorious book banned from schools, because of its racial slurs and the feature of a character portrayed as a "white savior."

Read To Kill A Mockingbird, and YOU decide whether it should be banned, or the best.