ITEM PHOTO BY OWEN O’ROURKE
Beverly’s Sarah Welch, left, and St. John’s Prep’s Hunter Costa were named Moynihan Lumber Athletes of the Year on Tuesday.
By STEVE KRAUSE
PEABODY — “Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever did.”
That was the message Ashley Waters, head softball coach at Boston University, had for this year’s Moynihan Lumber student-athletes of the year at Tuesday’s awards luncheon at Salem Country Club.
Waters, a former winner of the annual Moynihan scholarship herself, was there as the recipient of this year’ Post-Graduate Achievement Award.
“Your lives can be whatever you want them to be,” said Waters, who was the female athlete of the year in 2005. “This is a tremendous accolade.”
This year’s winners were Sarah Welch, a swimmer for Beverly High, and Hunter Costa, a wrestler for St. John’s Prep in Danvers. Both Welch and Costa were state champions this past winter.
The Moynihan Lumber Student-Athlete program was established in 1991 by the firm along with The Item, the Salem News, Newburyport Daily News and the Gloucester Times. MSOnewssports.com and 104.9 FM are also on the committee of North Shore media outlets that participate in the program.
Administrators from schools on the North Shore nominate student-athletes for the monthly award. At the end of the year, annual male and female winners are picked from the pool of monthly recipients, and receive $1,000 scholarships.
Among the past annual award winners are Peabody Mayor Ted Bettencourt, Mass. Golf Association executive Becky Blaeser, Major League Baseball executive Peter Woodfork, U.S. Olympian Shalane Flanagan, and two-time state two-mile champion Catarina Rocha.
Beverly High swim coach Dave Swinson said he felt fortunate to have been one of Welch’s coaches over the years.
“She hard-working in the pool, in school and in the community,” he said. “She was definitely someone her teammates could look up to.”
Her list of high school accomplishments is lengthy and varied. She was a National Honor Society member, a four-year AP scholar, and was in the Top 10 in her class. She will attend Brown University in the fall.
Swinson said Welch’s most significant community service activity is Swim Across America, a group that organizes multiple events to benefit cancer research.
In the pool, Welch was on the 200-meter medley relay team that set a state record, and is under consideration for All-America in that event, along with the 100 freestyle. She achieved All-America status in the 200 Individual Medley and 400 freestyle.
Costa’s father, Manny, who is also the wrestling coach at St. John’s, introduced his son and said that, curiously, after he was practically raised on buses that took the Eagles’ wrestling team to and from meets, he preferred soccer in his youth.
“All those students who were going to all those great schools … he grew up around those kids,” Manny Costa said. “But he decided he wanted to play soccer.”
So, Manny Costa said he’d strike a deal with his son.
“Give me one year of wrestling,” his father said. “Then you can do what you want.”
Costa soon found out, however, that if he wanted to get into a good school, it wasn’t going to be through soccer. Second-place finishes in the state tournament in his sophomore and junior seasons led him to drop soccer altogether and concentrate on winning that elusive championship in this senior year. And he asked his father to help train.
“First day, I’m there with the (wrestling) mat, which we had in the house, and he says, ‘no. We’re going to lift weights.’
“It’s been a real privilege training with my son,” he said. Costa won at All-States in the 138-pound class.
Also recognized Tuesday were Kevin Doyle, a freelance writer who received the Lifetime Commitment Award in the Community; James Coffey, the outgoing athletic director at Beverly High, Lifetime Commitment Award, Schools; and Jack Dean of Beverly, the Fan Award.