Welcome to the Alden Central School District Interscholastic-Athletic Program.  We are excited for your participation and grateful for your support. As with all our programs, both curricular and extra-curricular, our primary focus is the growth and development of the student-athletes that we work with daily. Interscholastic athletic participation and competition are two very important ways in which our students learn life lessons and skills that will serve them well in perpetuity. We strive to promote and develop positive traits such as sportsmanship, leadership, teamwork, oral communication, positive physical development, healthy lifestyle habits, and the list goes on. 

On the other hand, our interscholastic athletic program is not about winning at all costs. We strive for excellence in all our endeavors, in and out of the classroom. Winning a competition is sometimes the natural by-product of those efforts. The good feelings and accolades that come with winning provide motivation and memories that sustain us for a lifetime. Sometimes, however, our own excellent efforts cannot match the excellent efforts of our opponents. It is in the experience of defeat that we learn and grow as well, sometimes even more so than in victory. Through defeat we also hope to teach the lessons of perseverance and commitment to improvement. The once great coach Vince Lombardi said, “it is not in falling down that we are defeated, it is in not getting up.” 

Ultimately, we desire to support a thriving athletic program that conveys a healthy perspective regarding its important place in our lives. It is a human endeavor, thereby involving both emotion and imperfections. Therein lives both the beauty and the source of frustration. Sport and athletic competitions are not, however, life and death, despite the many metaphors we use to describe it as such. As most of us experience it at the community and scholastic levels, it is not a business or money-making machine where human beings are sometimes treated as possessions or commodities. Here, in our school community, it is a classroom, like all other classrooms in the schoolhouse where our children go to learn and grow. The challenge for us will always be to provide good teachers for that classroom and those lessons. In that sense, all of us, together, are both the teacher and the student. The potential for growth and success is never ending. Our opportunities will come unceasingly, because in sports “there is always next season.”