Last week, 14 seniors graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School with commitments to play their sports at the collegiate level.
Sophia Juanes Seto will be running NCAA Division I track and field at Cornell University in the fall. At CRLS, Juanes Seto runs the one and two-mile outdoor events, and holds the school’s two-mile outdoor record, which she set while finishing second in the state in the Division 1 championship meet on May 29th, noted CRLS director of athletics Tom Arria, who said via email “it broke her previous record set in 2024 by 14 seconds.”
Though Juanes Seto has been running track since she was in eighth grade, she didn’t decide she wanted to run in college until her junior year. Juanes Seto said her CRLS coaches were very supportive through the recruitment process.
The 2026 recruitment cycle was historic for a boys’ soccer team that went to the state quarterfinals. “For the first time in program history, we’re sending [four] students to play in [the] NCAA,” outgoing CRLS boys soccer coach Niko Emack said via email. [Disclosure: Emack is a member of Cambridge Day’s board.] The four are Andre Baraglia, brothers Michael and Rhys Brown and Angel Nunez. Baraglia will play at Hunter College, which won the Division III championship in 2024, while the other three will play at Emerson.
Support from the school
Arria described the school’s “responsibility” in the recruitment process as being to “guide” students and to “help them have a better understanding” of the process.
The school hosts a college recruitment information night each November, and invites students from all grades to attend. Last year’s event had a panel featuring a college coach, a senior who had already been offered an athletic scholarship, and an alum who had received a Division I scholarship. Rounding out the panel was Jordan Roldon, a school guidance counselor and the varsity girls volleyball coach, who “knows the landscape of the college recruitment process and the eligibility center very, very well,” Arria said. Additionally, the department keeps coaches informed on the recruitment process so they can support students as needed.
Andre Baraglia, who is committed to play soccer at Hunter College, described the recruitment process as “a lot of emailing.”
For Arria, the emphasis is on helping students choose the right “environment.”
“We talk about the idea of making sure you’re picking the right school for you,” he said, to make sure that “if you don’t have athletics, you’re still going to want to be at that school.”
For Oliver Henke, playing baseball in college was “always a goal” of his.
“It wasn’t something that I always knew was going to happen, but I always did everything I could to make it a possibility,” Henke said. Henke will be playing NCAA Division III baseball at Swarthmore College.
When Michael Brown, who will be playing Division III soccer at Emerson College, was a mentor for freshmen at CRLS, his main piece of advice for them was to join a sports team. Brown feels strongly that high school sports are a valuable way to gain “connections and community.”
Henry Thompson-Silbey has played on one of CRLS’s smaller teams, rugby, since his freshman year. “We haven’t had the best seasons because of [a] lack of players,” Thompson-Silbey said, explaining that for a 15 on 15 sport, they’ve usually only had 18-22 players. This year, however, the team had 28 students playing, and Thompson-Silbey felt he became closer with many of his teammates.
“It’s been really fun to… grow the team,” Thompson-Silbey said.
Farewell to a community
For many of the athletes, it will be hard to say goodbye to the CRLS athletic community.
“This [was] my 12th and last season as Falcon,” Juanes Seto said. “I’m definitely gonna miss the people on the team,” she added, noting that they “have a really good team culture.”
“I’ve been playing with the same group of kids for like my whole life,” Henke said. He described how special it was to “play at St. Peter’s Field in front of everyone who has coached you throughout your life.”
Outside of high school sports, “you’re never going to be in the same classes with all your teammates, take that bus ride every day, be at practice every single day, eat lunch with your teammates every day,” said Brown.
“It’s just such a privilege to be able to represent the city that I’ve lived in my entire life and that I love so much,” Henke said.
The full list of student commitments:
- Ada La Master — University of Washington crew
- Andre Baraglia — Hunter College soccer
- Angel Nunez — Emerson College soccer
- Emma Shaw — Colby College crew
- Fio Eddy — Harvard University soccer
- Henry Thompson-Silbey — University of Rhode Island rugby
- Michael Brown — Emerson College soccer
- Miel Henry — Suffolk University track and field
- Nina Mazereeuw — Amherst College swimming
- Oliver Henke — Swarthmore College baseball
- Owen Goldstein — Tufts University lacrosse
- Rhys Brown — Emerson College soccer
- Sophia Juanes Seto — Cornell University track and field
- Stefan Alexandrov — Wheaton College baseball
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