Why do GDS students take to the field? Why do they lace up their basketball sneakers as late as 8:00 p.m. on a Monday night, with tests and homework assignments waiting for them when they get home hours later? What drives athletes to compete, to put everything they have into a sport with no guarantee of success? The Bit asked GDS student-athletes these questions. Their response? The community.
Sophomore Lucky Dodge started playing soccer when he was three years old. His father, G. Richard Dodge, Jr., forced the younger Dodge to play. “Soccer was the main [sport] he wanted me to play because that’s what he played a lot, so I kinda just got forced into soccer,” Dodge said.
By the time Dodge was eight years old, he was hooked. He joined a club team and sometimes even squared off against his GDS classmates who were on opposing teams. “We beat them every time,” Dodge said, chuckling. “We won many championships with that team.” Dodge said that was the point when he became “really committed” to soccer.
Throughout Lucky’s soccer career, his father continued to energetically support him, attending almost every game to watch his son play. When G. Richard Dodge passed away in April of 2024 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the devastating loss complicated Dodge’s relationship with soccer, both as a player and as a spectator.
“At home he always watched sports, so I would feel weird when I watched sports at home.” Dodge said. “Playing I felt fine, but watching I felt weird.”
He added, “If I think about it [during a game], I’ll go into a spiral and start being really sad, and I don’t like that, so I just don’t think about it.”
“We’ve had players that have lost parents during the season or whose parents have gotten divorced or a sibling has been really, really sick or grandparents died,” Quinn Killy, Assistant Principal for Student Life and men’s varsity soccer head coach, said. “When we feel loss or things are hard, the connection to other people or community of people is really important.”
According to a study by the National Institute of Health, playing sports can improve high schoolers’ mental health, social skills and physical health. Athletics can also be a tool for dealing with grief or loss.
To players experiencing hardship—big or small—Killy had some advice: “Just come out here, and don’t worry about it. Play the game, practice, run around, do your thing, and then when it’s done, when the practice or game is over, then we can talk about it.”
Dodge, who played on the men’s varsity soccer team this fall, echoed his coach’s philosophy: “I just don’t think about it [his loss]; that’s my way of dealing with it.”
But sports doesn’t only help students cope with loss—it can also help them forge bonds with their peers.
Sophomore Felix Vogl moved across the country from California last year and started his freshman year in a new school and in a new state. He said playing on the junior-varsity basketball team freshman year helped him make friends and eased his transition to GDS.
“Sports were an outlet for me, but they weren’t only an outlet—they were a bridge to friendships,” Vogl said. “JV basketball was actually the best thing I did freshman year to be social and hang out with people.”
Not everyone gets the luxury of changing schools as a 9th grader; junior basketball player Eden Samuel transferred from Connelly School of the Holy Child this year. And she’s loving GDS, and its basketball team.
“I feel so welcome,” Samuel said. “I can just be myself. At my other school, you had to be a shell of yourself; everyone was judgmental and strict, and you had to be a certain type of person to be seen as fine or cool. It’s really nice being here because I feel like I can express myself.”
Samuel said her best friends at GDS are the ones she met on the basketball team.
(The Bit‘s managing editor, senior Teresa Dean, and Sports editor, senior Sabine Hletko Wood, are on the women’s varsity basketball team. They did not read or edit this article prior to publication.)
Twenty-two of 23 student-athletes interviewed by the Bit said they had made one or more close friends playing on a GDS sports team.
But Samuel is not just a transfer who’s come to love the GDS community. She’s an athlete, and a very good one at that. In the women’s varsity season opener on Dec. 3, she started and racked up six assists, four steals, six rebounds and a plus-minus rating—a measure of the net score change of a team while a specific player is on the court—of +16, the highest on the team.
“I started playing basketball in second or third grade,” Samuel said. “My brothers played, and my sisters started playing, so I was like, ‘I’m gonna do that too.’”
From the time she started playing at seven years old, Samuel said she was obsessed. “Since I started, I was so serious. I’d be out front shooting around, and if I didn’t make it I’d get so mad at myself,” she said. “I was like ‘I wanna get better and better and better,’ and I really did love the sport. I took on that challenge because I loved it so much.”
Reflecting on her season opener, Samuel spoke about the significance of playing for the GDS team.
“I feel proud to put on that jersey,” Samuel said.
Whether it’s the friendships student-athletes build, the fans cheering them on by the sidelines (sometimes) or representing their school while playing the sport they love, there is something special about playing sports for your school. That community extends beyond the field or court.
Sophomore tennis star Helena Seiken started playing tennis when she was four years old. “My parents just sort of signed me up, but I didn’t really play seriously until I was like 10 or 11,” she said. But when Seiken really committed to tennis—around 4th grade—she said she became very competitive.
“I enjoyed going to practice and tournaments more,” she said. “Tennis became less of a chore and more of my choice.”
In her two years at the GDS high school, Seiken has never lost a GDS league or tournament match. She’s ranked sixth in Maryland for the girls’ 16 and under division and 179th in the country.
While many GDS students study or socialize during their free periods, Seiken plays tennis. “[My free period] is at the end of the day, so from 2:30 to 5:30 I practice,” she said, like it was obvious.
But despite her many outside accomplishments, Seiken said there is something special to her about playing tennis at GDS.
“[Playing GDS tennis] reminds me why I started tennis in the first place because I just started to have fun,” Seiken said. “It’s easier to build friendships, and I’m able to be more close to my teammates than people I just train with every day at tennis school.”
These relationships can last a lifetime. “My five best friends in my life that I still keep in touch with to this day were guys that I played high school soccer with,” Killy said. “[Soccer] has bonded us since that time because you go through ups and downs and highs and lows as a group, and that does something to bind you together.”