Angela Alibrandi has been excelling in volleyball, softball, and basketball during her entire high school career. Now a senior, she is continuing to play and has already been accepted and has committed to Tufts University for excellence in academics and athletics.

Ever since Alibrandi was little, she has enjoyed being outside and staying active. She started playing T-ball in kindergarten and went on to try many other sports, such as soccer, cross country, and flag football.

“I guess when I was little, I always had a knack for trying new things and I really liked to play sports,” Alibrandi said.

Alibrandi has usually played more than one sport per year, and in her junior year, she took it a step further and played three sports in one year. This was a challenge for her but was not too daunting given her experience in athletics.

“Last year especially, I played three sports, [one in] every single season, so that was really hard, but I had been doing it since I was literally five years old, so that helped,” Alibrandi said.

After playing baseball up until the first grade, Alibrandi switched over and continued with softball, as well as starting basketball as a third grader. As for volleyball, she started only a few days before tryouts during her freshman year, at a three day pre-season camp. Although she was not so hopeful about making the WA freshman team during tryouts, she ended up going above and beyond by making it on the junior varsity team as a freshman.

“I just kind of went with it […] I showed up to tryouts and was like ‘If I don’t make it it’s okay, I’ll run cross country,’ and then I made it, I made JV,” Alibrandi said.

When it comes to sports, Alibrandi gets a rush from anything that involves running or aggression. She enjoys all the sports she plays, but out of the three sports she plays at WA, she likes basketball the best for its constant energy.

“I really like to run a lot, but I don’t like to just solely run, I like to do something else with the running […] There is just a lot more physical contact and aggression that happens during basketball,” said Alibrandi.

Playing all the sports she does has not been easy for Alibrandi. She has played for a national basketball team known as the New England Crusaders since her sophomore year and was required to go to tournaments to New York almost every weekend, which stressed her.

“If your last game was at six on Sunday, it’s not done until seven, and by the time you leave it’s seven-thirty. Then you have a four hour drive home and you have to eat dinner, and then there’s still homework that you haven’t finished yet,” said Alibrandi.

It wasn’t all negative, however. Stress taught Alibrandi useful skills, the most important being time management.

“At times I was barely sleeping at all, but I still always made it in for first block [on] Monday morning,” said Alibrandi.

Being on a national team also helped Alibrandi branch out to many people and make a lot of new friends.

“If I could do it again, I wouldn’t change anything about it, because with that team I have made some of the best friends that I could have ever imagined, and I’ll stay friends with those people for life,” said Alibrandi.

When Alibrandi continues on to Tufts, she will be playing for their basketball team, and although she will not be continuing softball, she still has volleyball in consideration. Although she is not entirely certain as to what she wants to do, she does know that she wants to major in some sort of science field, possibly biology or chemistry.

Alibrandi credits all the people who have helped her throughout her journey to get where she is today.

“I wouldn’t be nearly as good as I am today without my teammates and coaches. I mean, coaches are tough on you, but that’s what I like the most. I believe you can always improve yourself and you can always do better, and your teammates constantly push you through drills, and even when you’re really, really tired, your teammates help you and encourage you,” said Alibrandi.