It’s 7:45 on a school night and you’re lacing up your skates to hit the ice. With a Spartan head proudly displayed on your jersey, you are ready to represent the school you have loved for many years. But unlike other sports at Southern Lehigh, you aren’t affiliated with the district.
This story is all too familiar to the Southern Lehigh hockey team, which is technically a club sport and not affiliated with Southern Lehigh High School. The players are still able to wear the Southern Lehigh name, but they remain independent of the school in terms of safety, equipment, financial requirements, and more. Also, unlike other Southern Lehigh sports, their team consists of players from other schools in addition to ours.
“SL doesn’t have enough hockey players in high school to fulfill the team roster, so we can ‘draft’ other players from other schools to play for us,” said senior and ice hockey captain MJ Edwards, “This year we have nine players from Southern Lehigh and five from outside the district.”
The 2024-2025 team is coached by Coach Greco and Coach Howe and captained by Southern Lehigh seniors MJ Edwards and Nicholas Humphrey. At each of their games, they have a broadcaster, Nick Garofalo, who is a Southern Lehigh graduate. Nick shows up eagerly to cover all of their games on his YouTube livestream. At the end of the season, Garofalo announced that he will no longer broadcast for the team, but he considered it an honor while it lasted.
During the 2022-2023 season, the hockey team made it all the way into the Phantoms Cup Championship at the PPL Center, but lost to Northampton in a three-game series. After this success, however, they lost seven graduates going into the 2023-2024 season. Adjusting to the loss of many valuable players, they called this season their “rebuild year” because they had to start from scratch.
“Some struggles we faced were dropping an early game in the year to the worst team in the league, which we shouldn’t have lost,” said Humphrey.
Last season (2023-2024) Southern Lehigh combined their team with Emmaus because neither of them had enough players to form a complete team. Their 2023-2024 season record ultimately ended 2-8.
Unfortunately, the hockey team ended this season with a record of 3-7 on their senior night, on February 24th. Afterward, their team was still proud of what they had accomplished. If they would have won, they could have appeared in semifinals for the third time in four years. However, unforeseen circumstances, like injuries or illnesses, kept them from playing their best at the end of the year, and prevented them from advancing to playoffs.
“I think we couldn’t let those things plague us, but we were a young team this year, and I’m very proud of our season,” said Edwards.
Even though this season ended early and they didn’t make it to the Phantoms Cup Championship, at the end of the day they made lasting impacts they will remember for the rest of their lives.
“This team for the last four years has meant so much to me, to represent my school and win a championship for them and make another final the year after,” said Edwards. “Kids don’t even know we have a hockey team, so the fact that we were able to make the school aware of us and come to the games is the best impact I could have left on this team. [I] couldn’t be any prouder.”