Early in March, the high school winter sports season was edging toward a conclusion, and fans of Cicero-North Syracuse and Liverpool both had reasons to celebrate.
At C-NS, he girls basketball Northstars had just knocked off Baldwinsville, reclaiming the Section III Class AA championship it had held for eight consecutive years before West Genesee took it from them in 2017.
Over at Liverpool, the boys swimming Warriors had repeated as sectional champions and once again had claimed the George Falwell Cup, while the wrestling team had swept both league and sectional Class AA honors.
Then COVID-19 struck. It cancelled the state basketball tournaments, preventing the C-NS girls from going further, and then wiped out the entire spring sports season.
Among many other things, the cancellations kept C-NS from again hosting the state track and field championships at Bragman Stadium.
The lack of a softball season precluded both the chance for C-NS to build upon its run to the 2019 state Class AA title game, where it fell to Corning in an 11-inning classic, and Liverpool from the benefit of having long-time coach Nick Spataro return to the Warriors.
Spataro’s coaching comeback wasn’t the only major coaching move in the area. Eric Smith stepped down as the head coach of C-NS girls basketball and the school tapped Jamesville-DeWitt’s Rob Siechen to replace him, Siechen having led the Red Rams to three consecutive state titles from 2016 to ’18.
In order to turn around the struggling C-NS boys basketball program after John Haas stepped down, the school hired Kyle Martin a Tully High School graduate who had last coached in the college ranks at SUNY-Purchase.
When Siechen starts at C-NS, it might not happen until 2021-22. If so, it will deprive senior Jessica Cook of her last season before she attends the University of Toledo.
In the fall, both C-NS and Liverpool were unable to take the football field in the wake of a memorable 2019 where the Warriors won in the regular season, only to have the Northstars stage a comeback from a 21-point deficit in the sectional semifinals to avenge that defeat and later win its third straight sectional and regional titles.
But the fall did witness the C-NS girls soccer team return to prominence, winning its last seven games and finishing 9-2-1 overall, with a no. 6 spot in the final state Class AA rankings put together by the New York State Sportswriters and Coaches Organization for Girls Sports.
Individually, C-NS sophomore Kate Putman continued her superb cross country career, winning every local individual race she entered, including those against Liverpool and Fayetteville-Manlius, and finishing 11th in the 15-18 division of the AAU National Championships in Florida.
And C-NS’s most famous athletic alumnus continued to build her legend.
Breanna Stewart, returning from a torn Achilles, led the Seattle Storm to the WNBA championship for the second time in her storied career, but did much more off the court thanks to her increased social activism.
For her continued advocacy for victims of sexual abuse or her solidarity with “Black Lives Matter” protestors, Stewart was chosen as a “Sportspersonof the Year” by Sports Illustrated, the magazine honoring athletes for their work on and off the court, Stewart joining a list of honorees that includes LeBron James.
