Sports is life, as athletes as young as Sebastian Kresge, a seventh-grader at Camp Verde Middle School, have already figured out.
“My goals are to keep on running, and to keep playing soccer no matter what,” said Kresge, 13, who also scored his first four points of his basketball career Thursday, Nov. 19, in a nine-point win at Mayer Elementary School. “I feel like kind of a new player playing basketball. It’s my second year — I have a couple of friends on the team — and I’m probably not as strong in it as I am with soccer.
“I think I like cross country better, just because I like running, and I’m just better at it. In the spring, I also like to do track — wait, that’s considered running. I get home kind of late.”
Kresge’s youthful energy isn’t limited strictly to athletics, however, he said. His last progress report showed him making the honor roll with A’s and B’s.
“I like to play soccer a lot, but I also like to play a lot of sports and be on multiple teams,” said Kresge, who won a middle school cross-country meet in Clarkdale earlier this fall before running to third place last month at the Yavapai County Middle School Cross Country Championships in Chino Valley. “The summer is kind of like a break but training time at the same time, because I want to start going faster on more hills.
“I really only run when it’s cross-country season, but when it’s not, I like to run a couple miles on my own, when I have time, with my friends — who will usually be on bikes.”
The former Big Park Community School lead boys runner transferred to Camp Verde Middle School prior to the beginning of the school year because he “just wanted a change,” he said. “I was at Big Park for a really long time — five years.”
The four-day school week didn’t hurt.
“I like to sleep in Fridays,” he said. “I sometimes tease my friends at other schools how they have school that day and I don’t.”
But even on those days off, for two hours in the afternoons, he practices with his father, head coach Mark Kresge, fellow CVMS seventh-grader Ethan Church and 12 other teammates on Camp Verde’s only American Youth Soccer Organization team, the Verde Valley Venom.
For the full story, please see the Wednesday, Nov. 25, issue of the Camp Verde Journal.
