This year Hewitt welcomes a new athletic director, Amy Mulligan, who was born and raised in Maspeth, New York. As her job suggests, Coach Mulligan has a passion for sports that started when she was in just 1st grade. She played many sports growing up, including softball, tennis, roller hockey and basketball, which she played throughout college. Coach Mulligan says the highlight of her high school athletic career was winning the national championship for basketball. In college, Mulligan spent two years at the University of Vermont and two years at Queens College, where she earned her degree in Physical Education and a minor in Secondary Education.
Before coming to Hewitt, Coach Mulligan was a collegiate basketball coach and then taught first through fourth grade physical education at Leadership Prep Ocean Hill, a public charter school in Brooklyn. Coach Mulligan was drawn to Hewitt because of the school’s mission statement and the administration’s understanding of the importance of girl’s athletics. She says that athletics played an essential role in her own life growing up, and hopes to teach “all the women in the school” of “their potential and what they can succeed at.”
Hewitt’s enthusiasm for athletics and sports teams has been low in recent years, but Coach Mulligan believes that increasing the student attendance at sports games will help increase school spirit.. After speaking to her, Coach Mulligan spoke about a “domino effect” regarding student attendance leading to an exponentially increasing school spirit. In addition to student attendance, Coach Mulligan believes that the real source of this “domino effect” starts with “getting the parents more involved” which is what ultimately will make a difference.” However, Coach Mulligan doesn’t think that this is enough, and hopes to include the spirit of “our sports teams to start being there for each other teams…we had the varsity and JV volleyball teams show for the 5,6-7 game.”
Coach Mulligan believes that the key to successful sports teams are coaches “who are going to push our athletes to understand that when they feel that they’ve hit their point they can still go ten more feet and excel past the point that they think they can.” Mulligan see our athletic department as a long-term project that will take time to revamp. She says that as a school, we have to start thinking of our sports as programs not just separate JV and varsity teams. Even the middle school teams are included in this program as we’ve seen this fall with numerous members of the varsity soccer team in the middle school to fill the roster. This is one of the first steps that Coach Mulligan sees as proof “we are willing to build our program.”