Sadie Tavares

Schuylerville High School girls’ lacrosse and field hockey coach Erin Lloyd said Sadie Tavares “has always been a bull. She is the girl that will go through a brick wall to get the ball.”

“That’s a fair assessment,” Tavares admitted, with a laugh. “In basketball, I once ran through a door, and I didn’t know it was unlocked, and I fell right outside and almost got locked out of the building.”

One of 10 high school honorees for the third-annual Capital District Sports Women of the Year awards, Tavares surrounds herself with doors, and welcomes the opportunity to step through all of them, perhaps not so loudly as the one in the gym, but forcefully enough. A hard-hustling three-sport star who helped the Black Horses win the Section II Class D championship in girls’ lacrosse the last two seasons, Tavares has immersed herself in a variety of outside activities while maintaining an academic record that ranked No. 1 in her class.

An imposing presence as a defensive midfielder in lacrosse and field hockey, Tavares has been a co-captain in all three sports and was a Foothills Council first-team all-star in lacrosse.

She has shown an equally wide range academically, as the National Honor Society student has been involved in Math League, Spanish Club and Environmental Club, and has received awards such as the Rensselaer Medal & Scholarship for outstanding achievement in math and science, among others.

That speaks to her aspiration to study biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University in the fall of 2022 as a path to a career in neuroscience. Tavares has already served an internship at the Neural Stem Cell Institute in Rensselaer.

“I knew I loved biology and wanted to help people,” Tavares said. “I went there all this year to intern with Dr. David Butler, studied things like Huntington’s Disease and how horrible all these neurodegenerative diseases are, like Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. So I wanted to improve the lives of those people if I could.”

Tavares’ community service spans such organizations as Students Against Destructive Behavior (SADD) and has included coaching young kids, but she said her favorite is peer mentoring with special education students her age.

“I work with the life skills class at my high school, and every single week I go into the classroom, and we talk and play different games, and it’s really fun to interact with those students,” she said. “It’s very relaxing for me, as it is for them, to just unplug from all the honors courses that I’m taking and just talk to people who want to talk about things other than school.

If it doesn’t appear there are enough hours in a day to participate in the various activities and organizations she does while maintaining excellent academic and athletic careers, Tavares said that’s the way she prefers it.

“This is actually a question I get a lot,” she said. “The thing is, I really like to be busy. If I’m sitting down and on my phone, I feel like I’m not being productive. So I love to be out talking to people. I’m extremely extroverted, so I love to talk to people and interact with people and play sports against people. I like to give back to my community, so it’s not so much of a burden to me as it is something that I really want to do, something I want to incorporate into my everyday life.”

Tavares had played soccer for seven years before being convinced by Lloyd to switch to field hockey as her fall sport two years ago, especially since the workouts and weight training had much more carryover into spring lacrosse, Tavares’ favorite sport.

The Black Horses won their second straight Section II championship by beating Cohoes 18-4 this spring.

“Winning the sectional championship this year and last year for lacrosse, it was just really nice to see all your hard work pay off with the people you spend the whole year conditioning with and training with,” Tavares said. “‘Oh, we’re going to get that white patch,’ and it’s so nice to finally be validated and get it.”

“Her presence in the halls and on the fields of Schuylerville High School will be greatly missed next year,” Lloyd said. “We are proud of her as a school community, and cannot wait to see what her future holds.”

After all her accolades and achievements, Tavares said she was especially gratified to be nominated for the Capital District Sports Women of the Year award.

“I just found out about this award this year, but once I saw it, I was immediately drawn to it, because you don’t see a lot of women in sports coverage, and it was really nice to see that, with the 50th anniversary of Title IX and everything,” she said. “I was so overjoyed and not expecting it at all. But it’s so awesome to be a part of this amazing group of people that I’m going to be joining.”