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Thursday's Internet Edition, August 28, 2008.
Wilton youth chosen to represent US on overseas basketball tour
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Photo courtesy to River Valley Times
Wilton resident Kayla Froehlich-Williams, a junior and member of the girls’ basketball team at Wilton Christian School, has been chosen to travel to Denmark, Finland, Lithuania and Estonia as part of an US Christian basketball team.
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By Fran Soto
River Valley Times Staff
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Wilton resident Kayla Froehlich-Williams was born and raised in Wilton. She is a junior at Wilton Christian School, hails from an old established Wilton family, has three brothers and is active in school. But this budding basketball star is not spending her summer quietly in the rural countryside.
Rather, Froehlich-Williams and 15 other basketball players from California, Oregon, Washington and western Canada are traveling to Denmark, Finland, Lithuania and Estonia as part of the National Basketball Camp (NBC) International Tours girls’ basketball team. “We were chosen to go overseas to play basketball and to witness and become friends with people over there,” Froehlich-Williams said.
The team will be traveling with two coaches, a team mom and a banker who will be handling the finances, passports and travel arrangements for the group. “We will be playing eight games and sightseeing and shopping,” Froehlich-Williams said. “A lot of people have been very gracious in donating money to finance our trip.” This will be Froehlich-Williams’s first trip outside the borders of the United States.
The team will meet and share testimonies at a training camp in Seattle, Washington, before flying out on August 17. Froehlich-Williams will be traveling to Seattle with her parents, who will be meeting the coaches and players before seeing their daughter off. “It is really exciting being able to go and see how other people live, to see the different cultures and how everything works over there,” Froehlich-Williams said. “And knowing that we can go and witness to them is a big thing.”
Froehlich-Williams started playing basketball in the fifth grade at Wilton Christian School and became really interested after playing summer league in high school. “A lot of people around the school helped me with it and made me love the game more,” Froehlich-Williams said. “And I have a wonderful high school coach.” Wilton resident Kirt Duncan has volunteered at Wilton Christian School as the girls’ basketball coach for the past 13 years. “I started coaching my own kids, and now my youngest daughter is the assistant coach,” Duncan said.
Coach Duncan believes in encouraging his team to win, but also to be graceful losers. “Everyone is going to lose a game sometime,” he said. The Wilton girls’ basketball team plays in Section 5 of a league for high schools with 300 students or less. They play against private and public schools. “I hear that we are one of the favorites to win in Section 5,” Duncan said.
College plans are still in the future for Froehlich-Williams, although colleges begin recruiting athletes in their junior year. “Several major colleges have already shown interest in Kayla,” Duncan said. “She wouldn’t be going to Scandinavia if she wasn’t as good as she is.”
The team will be traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark and Helsinki, Finland before visiting Lithuania and Estonia. Lithuania is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea and borders Latvia, Belarus, Poland and the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Lithuania has been a member state of the European Union since May 2004. Estonia has land borders to the south with Latvia and to the east with Russia. It is separated from Finland by the Gulf of Finland and from Sweden by the Baltic Sea, and has also been a member of the European Union since May 2004.
Froehlich-Williams will be returning to the United States on August 29.
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