Helen Newton '14

Athlete of the Week: Ariana Bourque '16

Women's Ice Hockey

Ariana Bourque ’16 turned heads with a five-point performance last weekend in two games against Trinity. She scored two goals, including the game-winner in Friday’s 2-1 victory and assisted on Bowdoin’s other three goals. The left winger turned a likely loss into a tie with Saturday’s effort, notching a goal and an assist in an 18-second span to erase a 3-1 deficit. Bourque now leads the team in points with 16, equaling her mark from last season with five regular season games left to be played. She shares the team lead in assists with Mallory Andrews ’14 and trails leading goal-scorer Chelsea MacNeil ’15 by just one goal.
Bourque, a Massachusetts native, decided she wanted to play hockey when she was five years old, but her parents feared that she was too small for contact sports. Still, Bourque was determined to play and finally started skating at age 12. She played defense until high school, drawing light-hearted comparisons to Boston Bruins hall-of-famer Ray Bourque because of their shared surnames and the fact that she wore his number for a period of time.
Bourque left Massachusetts to attend high school at The Holderness School in New Hampshire, where she played soccer, ice hockey and lacrosse. She had been playing soccer since she was three and considered it her primary sport until her sophomore year.

Athlete of the Week: Erin Silva '15

Track & Field

Erin Silva ’15 has transformed years of honed gymnastic ability into consistent success in the pole vault event.
Last weekend at the New England Division III Indoor Championships, Silva vaulted for a new personal best of 3.75 meters—or 12.3 feet—raising the bar on the Bowdoin record she originally set as a first year and has broken many times since.
Currently ranked No. 7 nationally, Silva will likely qualify for nationals for the third year in a row. Maintaining her current rank would also earn her a second All-American distinction.
Silva began vaulting as a sophomore in high school—convinced by a friend and vaulter—when she grew too tall for gymnastics, a sport that she had been competing in since first grade. She also sprinted in that first year of competing, and her speed on the 100-foot runway eased her transition to vaulting.
Her gymnastics background has helped her to gracefully execute the turn during the swing-up phase of the vault. During this phase, the vaulter quickly inverts her body before swinging over the bar.
Head Coach Peter Slovenski, a former vaulter himself, said that speed and grace are two of the most difficult things to teach, and the notion that they can be learned at all is up for debate.
“Erin is very talented at all three phases of vaulting,” said Slovenski. “She’s one of the five fastest sprinters on our team. She has terrific jumping ability, and she has strong arms and gymnastic ability for the swing-up phase.”
The jumping phase involves converting forward momentum into upward momentum once the runner plants the pole in the metal box at the end of the runway. The fiberglass pole then bends dramatically to lift the vaulter up and forward, at which point she must execute the “swing-up” phase.
“Field event athletes have to be able to make adjustments in their technique, and this is a great strength of Erin’s,” Slovenski said. “There are a hundred things to coordinate, and she’s got a gift for coordinating all of them in the space of about three seconds.”
Silva said she made the decision to vault in college because she felt she had not yet hit her potential after only vaulting for three years.
“It’s been a long process,” she said. “It’s impossible to do a perfect vault, I would say. There’s always something you can do better.”
Silva’s success has been consistent since her arrival. Teammates expect her to win most of the meets she competes in, particularly the smaller regular season meets.
“I think she feels some pressure because, during some of the smaller meets or home meets, we kind of expect her to win and get her 10 points,” said captain Emily Clark ’15.
For reference, the Polar Bears scored 51 points in last week’s meet, so Silva’s second place finish—and the eight points it earned for the team—accounted for more than 15 percent of the team’s total.
Silva and the meet’s champion, Jenna Adams of Williams College, actually jumped the same height, but Silva lost the tiebreaker because she cleared the mark on her third attempt. Adams made the jump on her first attempt. Neither vaulter could clear 3.90 meters on their three given attempts.
Silva acknowledged that she feels more pressure when she attempts something she has already accomplished, and said she appreciates the constant challenge of improving her own performances, which is less stressful for her. She also said she felt motivated coming back from Spain, where she had been abroad for the fall semester.
Slovenski and vaulter Emily Lambdin ’16 said they noticed that Silva returned at a slight disadvantage having been away from vaulting, though Slovenski said she overcame it about six weeks into the season.
“At the beginning of the season, she was vaulting a lot lower than she usually does,” Lambdin said. “She jumped 11.1 [feet] a lot, which is still amazing, but low for her.”
To compare, the qualifying height for women at the NESCAC Championship meet is 7.6 feet.Slovenski believes that about 13 feet—4 meters—is a realistic goal for Silva before she graduates. He noted that somewhere between 13 feet and 13.4 feet is usually good enough to win nationals.
“The pole vault is so complex that there are still things to improve, even for an All-American,” he said. “Erin does dozens of things at a high technical level, but there will always be more things to learn.”
The sports editor of the Orient chooses the Athlete of the Week based on exemplary performance.

Athlete of the Week

Women's Swimming

Alex Vasile

Orient Staff

February 21, 2014

Helen Newton ’14 is the fastest breaststroke swimmer in Bowdoin history, at least according to the record books, where her name sits atop lists for the 50, 100 and 200-meter races. Each record fell at the women’s NESCAC Championship last weekend, Newton’s last collegiate race. She had broken them unofficially as part of the 400-meter medley and 200 medley relay teams, which also broke school records, but had to wait to replicate her finishes in the individual events. When she did, she held the records by a couple of seconds and had beaten her personal best by nearly three seconds in her main event, the 100m.

Newton began swimming around age three and remembers learning the frog kick technique even at that point. She specialized in the breaststroke all through high school and spent most of her offseason time on lacrosse. The prospect of playing lacrosse brought her to Bowdoin, where she met current teammate and breaststroke swimmer, Maeve O’Leary ’14, who convinced her to consider joining Bowdoin swimming. Left without a major commitment until lacrosse started practicing, Newton ultimately found her way to the pool, though she did not introduce herself to Head Coach Brad Burnham until late October that year.

“She had a good pull and a good kick,” he said. “It seemed that she was lacking experience more than anything.”

“Most of [the swim team] swam all through our childhood, 11 months of the year,” O’Leary said. “She didn’t have that background.”

When Newton did approach Burnham, she remembers him telling her that the team had to like her as much as she liked them. That did not turn out to be a problem. Newton finished her senior season as the sole captain of the women’s team, a rare occurrence, as the team has had at least two in previous years. By many accounts, she brought enthusiasm to the team.

“She’s been a role model, at least to me,” said Patty Boyer ’15. “And especially to the underclassmen who came from swim clubs. They’re very individualized. You only care about what you’re swimming.”

Newton’s swims in her first year were not particularly inspiring. She admits to being overwhelmed by both her first year of college and collegiate swimming, particularly at NESCACs, where the number of swimmers and talent left her wondering if she belonged.

“I didn’t really grasp the commitment,” she said. “All the swimming I would be doing, coming back early…I remember telling my parents I would be home for five days over Christmas break.”

Burnham mentioned that Newton used to tire out during races. O’Leary believes the endurance she gained by swimming more often allowed her to catch up with the other swimmers. By the time they reached their senior year, O’Leary noted that Newton was never at a loss for energy.

“After doing these crazy runs, I would go collapse on my bed and she would go to the pool.” said O’Leary, referring to the training for the marathon the pair ran last October.

She also said that Newton started her senior season in the best shape of her career.

For her last race, she returned to Williams for NESCACs, and announced before racing that she intended to break Bowdoin’s 100m record.

“Her internal competitiveness is not always expressed, but it’s there,” Boyer said. “Anything she puts her mind to, she can do.”

Burnham encourages his swimmers to swim as many events as they can, because by designating certain events as an exhibition, they can test themselves without worrying about scoring points. Newton mentioned that she and O’Leary failed to designate their 50-meter, so they were forced to score on it instead of one of the 100 and 200-meter. She believed that her anger over failing to designate her race, combined with the emotion of her last race, gave her the inspiration to finish as well as she did. O’Leary even joked that Newton cried after her races, which she says she herself never does.

While unwilling to admit to crying, Newton said she was indeed very emotional after the races ended.

“I didn’t think about my high school experience this way,” she said. “It made me realize how much these last four years have meant.”

The sports editor of the Orient chooses the Athlete of the Week based on exemplary performance.

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