Golden girls: 3 sisters play together, win together
golden» Haley Prey paid a price to earn a black belt in karate. She would occasionally leave sparring sessions with her nose bloodied, the air sucked from her lungs after absorbing a wellplaced strike to the gut.
What she couldn’t do was complain. The two sparring partners were her older sisters, Sydney and Makena, and Haley wasn’t about to let them see her sweat.
“I couldn’t show it,” Haley said. “I just had to keep fighting. It’s just about being competitive and staying in there.”
Years of intense sibling rivalry have made the Prey sisters — Sydney, a senior, 18; Makena, junior, 17; and Haley, freshman, 15 — a formidable athletic trio this year at Golden High School. The girls had long anticipated the lone year they’d all spend as high school peers, and they were determined to make the most of it.
It’s safe to say they have.
All three girls started during the winter for the Golden girls basketball team, leading the Demons to their first Jeffco League title in a decade and advancing to the Class 4A state quarterfinals. They repeated the feat in the spring by leading the girls golf team, as its three top scorers, to a league title and a team berth in the upcoming 4A state golf tournament, which begins Monday in Erie.
“I told them after basketball (season), when they lost in the final eight, this was best experience I’ve had in my life, just watching the three of them together,” said their father, Hank Prey, a former college basketball player at Colorado School of Mines. “I’m going to miss it. You think it’s a long time, but it’s such a short time span once it’s over. It’s everything I could have hoped for.”
Sydney, who was named the 4A Jeffco League female athlete of the year, will graduate Friday and then turn her attention to a college career at Colorado Mesa University, where she will golf and play basketball.
Before a practice for their final tournament together last week, the three sisters sat on a patio at the Fossil Trace Golf Club that overlooked the abundantly green valley below, reflecting on what they had accomplished together. They became second-degree black belts when they were younger. They initially resisted their father’s attempt to outfit them with golf clubs, only to gravitate toward the mental challenge that the game provided. The sisters have pushed one another in the classroom, where their perfor-
mances stretch the boundaries of the grade-point scale. All three sisters have GPAs better than 4.5.
The success they cultivated during this memorable year has always been rooted in competition. The only thing worse than losing was losing to your sister. So the battles they waged — whether on a basketball court, on the golf course or in a water-balloon fight with their extended family — never lacked intensity.
“We have a ton of cousins, and when they come for the Fourth of July, it’s like, ‘Let’s play football or basketball,’ ” Sydney said. “Our whole family is competitive. You want to be on the team that wins.”
“Some kids end up crying,” Makena said, her sisters chuckling while nodding in agreement. “There can be tears.”
Paul Miller routinely sees that competitive spirit bubbling just below the surface. The second-year golf coach at Golden has seen daily competitions on the driving range carry as much intensity as any tournament the sisters enter.
“On the range, everybody mishits a shot from time to time,” Miller said. “They’ll kind of ride each other a little bit. Somebody might miss one and they’ll say, ‘Oh, nice shot, Makena.’ They will kind of laugh it off, but it’s the camaraderie between the three. You can tell they’re really close.”
The scoreboard is never out of view for the Prey sisters. Earlier this spring, Haley bested Makena in a Jeffco League tournament, her first victory over one of her sisters at the high school level. When the three came home that evening, Sydney quickly proclaimed: “Haley beat Kena!” Hayley and Sydney teased their middle sister, warning her the scores would be announced over the intercom during morning announcements at school the next day.
But falling short in the sibling rivalry simply produces motivation. Two weeks after Makena lost to Haley, she put together one of her best performances of the season in a league tournament and finished in front of Sydney, who finished seventh at the state championships as a junior last season.
“When they walked in the door, not a word was said,” Hank Prey said with a laugh. “I said, ‘Why is nobody giving Sydney crap about this?’ Nothing was said that night. It was a different reaction now that the oldest of those three got beat. It was a different dynamic.”
On Monday, the sisters will compete together as high school teammates for the final time. Loveland is considered the favorite to win the championship, but if the Prey sisters can all put it together one last time, their cherished year may just add one more winning memory.
Sydney knows the team will need a big performance out of their younger sister to take home a championship. Her role once more is to provide advice.
“”She’s bound to be crazy nervous, as nervous as she’s ever been,” Sydney said. “She just have to stay mentally tough and realize that it’s 18 holes. You just have to keep fighting.”
Perhaps those grueling karate lessons will pay off.