Thanks to our continued partnership with Univest Financial, SuburbanOneSports.com will once again recognize a male and female featured athlete each week. The recognition is given to seniors of high character who are students in good standing that have made significant contributions to their teams or who have overcome adversity. Selections are based on nominations received from coaches, athletic directors and administrators.
North Penn’s Belle Sparango and Wissahickon’s Tristan Cairnes were the final Univest Featured Athletes of the 2021-22 school year. Both have remarkable stories. Below is a segment from both. Check out the complete stories (links below) and check back every week to read about a male and female SOL senior Univest Featured Athlete.
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Female Athlete
Belle Sparango was every girl. The 2022 North Penn graduate played pretty much every sport as a youngster but fell in love with field hockey and lacrosse. She went on to become a key member of both the hockey and lacrosse squads and also excelled in the classroom, boasting a rigorous schedule that was packed with honors and AP classes. She was a member of National Honor Society and also was involved with Special Olympics and Unified Sports. She spent her summers working as a lifeguard.
Sparango, like all of her classmates, was looking forward to the return to normalcy last fall after two years of high school altered dramatically by the COVID 19 pandemic. And everything was going smoothly. Even when her life was interrupted by a bout with COVID in September that sidelined her for 10 days, it was hardly cause for concern except she had several nagging symptoms. “When I came back to field hockey, I remember having a conversation with our athletic trainer and my coach – I was like, ‘Hey, I’m having shortness of breath, I’m having a hard time doing the conditioning, the running on the field. I think it’s just a side effect of COVID because that’s one of the things it can give you,’ so they monitored me,” Sparango recalled. “Another thing was – I would all of a sudden just cough. That was definitely bizarre, but I passed it off as COVID.”
Sparango finished out her final field hockey season. It wasn’t until she took a spin class with a friend – her very first - that she noticed something that raised a red flag. “I was wiping the sweat off my neck, and there were lumps,” Sparango said. “I went back to my pediatrician, and she didn’t really know what it was. At first, she thought it was mono, but my throat was fine. I wasn’t sick like that, so she sent me to get a chest x-ray. I went right after I went to the doctor. There was a lymph node about the size of a baseball surrounding my trachea, so that’s where the shortness of breath was coming from. That’s when the radiologist called my mom and was like – she needs to go to CHOP. My mom had thyroid cancer a few years ago, and she found a lump on her neck. When I felt those lumps, and I showed my mom, it was kind of like, an ‘oh crap’ moment.”
A diagnosis of lymphoma marked the beginning of an improbable journey that included 12 weeks of chemotherapy and 12 more of radiation, a stretch that ended with her final radiation treatment on June 3. Sparango’s story is one of resiliency and courage and an indomitable human spirit that would not be broken. This fall Sparango is attending the University of Delaware where she is majoring in biology on a pre-med track with her sights set on becoming a fertility doctor. “I’ve always wanted to be a fertility doctor,” she said. “I just think it’s fascinating, but through this whole experience, I want to be a fertility doctor that specifically works with cancer patients because fertility was a top concern of mine going through chemo. I still have to see a fertility doctor, but luckily, it’s a very low chance of severe problems, you know others aren’t that lucky, so I would love to work with cancer patients.”
An inspiration to all whose path she crosses, Sparango has refused to let lymphoma define her. “Honestly, I tried not to let it affect my personality,” she said. “It has taken so much from me, and it’s not going to take my personality at all. I could allow what it took, and I was like – ‘My personality - it’s not going to take that.’ Now I just see it as – you can’t control what life throws at you. You can’t do anything about it, but you can control how you go about it. When I got diagnosed, I could let it break me or I could become stronger. I was like, ‘I’m going to become stronger.’ So that’s how I see it now - you can control how you deal with things that are thrown at you. Anything life throws at me – I’m ready for it. It’s not going to break me, and I’ve just got to do it.”
To read Sparango’s complete profile, please click on the following link: https://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/female/belle-sparango-00101247
Univest’s SuburbanOneSports.com Featured Male Athlete
The pandemic has been difficult enough for high school athletes to navigate the last two-plus years, but what would you do if, on top of that, an EF-2 tornado in suburban Philadelphia dropped a tree directly on top of your home? While it sounds like an improbable scenario found only in Hollywood movie scripts, this became a stunning reality for Tristan Cairnes and his family when said tornado and its 130-MPH winds inexplicably tore through Upper Dublin Township on Sept. 1, 2021. Cairnes, a football and baseball player at Upper Dublin High School, had been sent home with his football team that afternoon due to the approaching storm. He was on a Zoom call with head coach Bret Stover and the rest of the team, watching film from the season-opening win over Wissahickon (where his dad, Jim, is the athletic director) and preparing for the next one against Council Rock South when all hell broke loose in an instant.
“Around 1 or 2 p.m. they canceled after-school sports, which is why I was home on the Zoom call,” Cairnes recalled. “You always get those weather alerts on your phone when there's a really bad storm and don’t think much of them; those started happening around 4 or 5. My mom started screaming for me to get down to the basement immediately. I went downstairs to the kitchen and as I opened the basement door and went down one step, it sounded like a train coming toward the house. There was a big bang, and then a huge crack right above where we eat dinner. The whole rest of the night, it was like a waterfall in our kitchen.”
The Cairnes Family was lucky that their home was not completely uninhabitable, but it shrunk exponentially as most of the first floor needed to be entirely renovated. Cairnes was able to sleep in his bedroom, which now doubled as a storage facility, so needless to say things were very uncomfortable for about three to four months. After the pandemic confined so many to their homes, Cairnes now couldn’t even feel normal there because a tornado — yes, a tornado, in Montgomery County! — upended his sanctuary. It made Cairnes lean into athletics even more as a distraction, even if Upper Dublin had to figure out where it could even practice and play due to the damage to its own field. (Jim Cairnes, dealing with an impossible family situation himself, was one of the first people who opened Wissahickon’s doors to share their facilities with the displaced Cardinals.)
Cairnes’ story is even more amazing when zooming out and viewing it from a broader scope: after spending his freshman year at La Salle, he made the decision to transfer back to the public school system in Upper Dublin, where he had been a student since kindergarten. Three years, one pandemic, one tornado and two district championships later, Cairnes has truly come full circle on his journey.
And while his final football season did not have quite as storybook an ending as Cairnes’ junior year when UD captured the District One 5A title, the Cardinals still posted a 9-3 record, finished second in SOL Continental and won a district game before bowing out at the hands of Plymouth Whitemarsh in the second round. All of this is amazing considering the damage the tornado wrought on the community, and UD football coach Bret Stover said Cairnes never let on how much that day impacted him and his family.
“We didn’t practice the following Monday because the kids, including Tristan and his brother (Nate), went into the community to remove downed trees,” Stover said. “The tree devastation was unbelievable, and our guys were bouncing from house to house to help. He never once let on about the damage to his house because it wasn’t about that with Tristan. To him, there were people a lot worse off than the hand he and his family were dealt.”
Cairnes is attending West Chester University in the fall, where he is studying Economics and Finance. He isn't playing football or baseball for West Chester, although he'll probably give club baseball a try since it’s hard for Cairnes to envision a life without the sport.
That being said, if this past baseball season represented Cairnes’ final one as a competitive athlete, then he picked a good time to hang up his cleats. By going back to Upper Dublin as a sophomore, Cairnes bet on himself in his most comforting environment, and despite unprecedented events such as a global pandemic and a horrific tornado in suburban Philly, he has two district titles and a wealth of memories to carry him on into the next stage of his life.
To read Cairnes’ complete profile, please click on the following link: https://www.suburbanonesports.com/featured-athletes/male/tristan-cairnes-00101221
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