For Marissa Baker, it was the field hockey season that almost wasn’t. The former Darien High School standout was getting ready for her junior season for the Middlebury College Panthers when a wakeboarding accident in early August left her with a serious high ankle sprain. A determined Baker, however, was in action several weeks later for Middlebury, playing in the Bowdoin game on Sept. 22. And despite her rough start, she completed her most successful season to date.

Georgia Cassidy is an athlete on a mission: Help take the Colby College field hockey team back to the top of the Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference, known as the NESCAC. And the former Darien High School standout may just be the player who can make it happen.

As a young junior tennis player, Caroline Dunleavy played in some of her earliest tennis tournaments at the Yale University tennis center. Last Friday, the 19-year-old Darien native played on those same courts against one of the top players in the world.

Darien resident Caroline O’Brien is a 2018 world rowing champion in the Under-23 lightweight pairs division. Competing at the World Rowing U-23 Championships in Poznan, Poland, in July as part of the U.S. Women’s National Team, O’Brien paired with teammate Sarah Maietta to win the gold medal, beating out Germany, Italy and Hungary.

In the world of competitive sports, singles tennis is known as one of the most solitary athletic pursuits: You are alone on the court, playing only for yourself, without teammates to cheer you on. After playing on the junior tennis circuit, however, Darien High School’s Bobby Neuner found a community on the Wave boys varsity tennis team.

At age seven, Darien’s Lilly Ma started playing tennis as a way to keep up with her older brother.  Now nine years later, the 16-year-old rising DHS senior is the FCIAC 2018 Girls Tennis Player of the Year.

It was 38 degrees, with steady rain and strong headwinds, at the Boston Marathon this past April, but the conditions didn’t slow down Darien’s Heather Pech. The 56-year-old won her age group, women ages 55-59, for the second year in a row with a time of 3:10:15.  Her time was so fast that not only did she win her bracket by a margin of seven and a half seconds, Pech also beat the winning time in the 50-54 age group by three and a half seconds.

Stanford University senior Dillon Schoen still remembers the first time she visited the prestigious university. The former Darien High School lacrosse player was on a recruiting trip when she fell in love with Stanford, despite the fact that its lacrosse program was not as well known as the programs at other schools she had visited.

Alex Ostberg is quickly rising to the top of Stanford University’s elite track and field team. And he’s just getting started. The former standout Darien High School distance runner recently earned his first college All-America honors in cross country, and has now set his sights on making the NCAA outdoor championships this spring.