For one Rosedale Raven, there is no such thing as coming to a crossroads when it comes to sports and arts.
Paige Krossing balances the two with as little effort as it takes for her to stop a penalty kick.
“Because we’re an arts school you have to juggle your arts subjects and your extra-curricular stuff,” she says, while on summer break.
The grade 11 is heading into her senior year, one that raises anticipation for what the soccer season will bring.
“I guess I’m looking forward to who else is going to be coming to the team because we’re going to have a new group of people and see how far we’re going to get,” she said. “We do pretty well every year.”
This past year the squad finished at 3-2 on the season, and bowed out in the first round of Tier 2 playoffs 1-0 to Jarvis Bulldogs, a squad they beat during the regular season.
Still, Krossing likes to break the stigma that an arts school has no business in sports.
“People see we’re Rosedale and they immediately assume we’re awful and they’re going to beat us easily and a lot of the time we beat them,” she said. “We crush them and they’re like, ‘Oh, well, never thought that’.”
With two thirds of the school’s population being female, girls athletics has a lot more to draw on.
“So all of our girls teams have a lot of people, lots of talent, but the boys teams don’t always fair as well,” she said, with a laugh.
Krossing comes from a strong soccer background, playing goalkeeper for premiere teams in East York, a contrast from the rest of her family that is purely arts.
Krossing’s Mom Karen is a fiction writer, while dad Kevin is an OCAD grad working as an Internet ad designer. Sister Tess is a singer, but picks up footie for fun.
“She does more arts performances than I do,” Paige said. “I help her sometimes with soccer stuff, just like little tricks on how to tell if someone is going to do something.”
As for the 16-year-old’s artistic yens, she’s a sketcher. But ever since a grade 10 class in drama tech, she’s fallen fast for behind the scenes action in film.
After a year of soccer and volleyball as a Raven she’ll be looking to take on Ryerson’s theatre tech program.
But in the meantime, it’s all about what her role as captain will bring in 2012.
“A lot of our players that we played with a lot left, so we had a totally new team with younger players,” she said.