Berkshire Bulletin Summer 2021

BLAST PROGRAM EMPOWERS FEMALE ATHLETES

By Megan Mokriski ’21, Editor of “The Green and Gray”

It was hard not to notice the group of more than 70 female athletes working out, playing loud music, and cheering each other on every Monday and Thursday afternoon last fall— which is exactly what the founders of BLAST intended.

BLAST is a workout program designed for Berkshire’s female varsity athletes to make them stronger, prevent injury, and foster a supportive environment. Athletes can also work with different coaches and take their training to the next level—physically and mentally—as they set their sights on collegiate athletics.

The initiative was a collaborative effort between varsity coaches, including Cori Chambers, Lisa Marshall, Katherine Simmons, Heidi Woodworth, and many others. Coach Woodworth said BLAST was an opportunity “to better serve our athletes.”

Their goal is to create a space where female athletes can feel proud of who they are and what they can do. In the past, Coach Marshall said there’s been a “tangible inequity” between girls’ and boys’ sports at Berkshire, and many girls have felt that they are not taken seriously as athletes, despite the large number of girls who play two or three varsity sports. The coaches wanted to figure out what Berkshire sports had been lacking in the past and find a way bridge that gap.

To Coach Marshall, BLAST is “the passing of responsibility. So much of why I came back to work at a boarding school is to not only identify what I did have and appreciate it, but also to identify what I didn’t have. And what we’re doing here is so much more than what I lived.”

Coach Becky McCabe wanted to give back after her time as a student athlete at Berkshire, and to offer the next generation of athletes the same opportunities she had. That includes mentoring other athletes, just as Coach Sylvia Gappa was a mentor for her.

Many female athletes grow up with the message that they should “keep up with the boys,” but Coach Simmons hopes that BLAST relays a different message: “I want to keep up with the girls. I want the girls to set the standard,” she said.

The highlight so far for Coach Marshall was seeing athletes supporting each other. One moment in particular stands out: after a hard BLAST practice, athletes were finishing up with sprints, and “all of the girls were so tired, but they were still cheering for each other to finish ... you can’t coach that, you can’t make them cheer, it’s something that you have to want to do. And in life, you need other people to pick you up, and you need other women to empower you instead of breaking you down.”

If one athlete gets stronger, everyone else does too, which is imbued in the BLAST motto: “If she gets stronger, we get stronger.” And beyond getting stronger, Coach Woodworth says that these first BLAST participants are “rewriting the narrative around female athletics at Berkshire.”

Athletes to Coaches

The Berkshire coaches that participated in coaching the BLAST program were Kelley Bogardus, Callie Carew-Miller, Cori Chambers, Hannah Cooke ’14, Dory Driscoll, Sylvia Gappa, John Hyland, Maura MacKenzie, Lisa Marshall, Becky Zavisza McCabe ’05, Britt Plante, Katherine Simmons, Georgia Tuttle, and Heidi Woodworth. All of the coaches were also athletes themselves. Combined, they played 135 varsity high school seasons and 78 seasons of college athletics, captained 43 teams, won 16 league championships, completed 11 marathons, earned four college All-Americans, and one coach even played at the national level.