Sports have helped guide Kate Hall, a Stonington High school junior. They have created opportunities for her, provided her with lifelong friends and mentors, helped her overcome adversity, given her a voice.

She knows it, too, which is perhaps the difference between this Kate and, say, freshman year Kate.

“Sports are my thing. That’s what helped me through high school,” Hall said. “I would have honestly flunked out of high school. I didn’t care. It was irrelevant, a what’s the point kind of thing. I don’t know what I was doing. I’ve always struggled. Freshman year, I hit a wall.”

She came close to not being eligible for basketball season, carrying a 1.9 grade point average, she said, with a few days left in the marking period.

“I wasn’t leaving my house and I couldn’t play basketball,” Hall said. “Like, ‘my mom is making my life hell and coach (Paulla) Solar (the Stonington girls’ basketball coach) is, too.' I had to do it. … Sports have been my life. It’s about who you know, how you act with maturity. It’s pretty much like a job. You learn to balance everything. Three-sport athletes, multi-sport athletes are well-rounded people because of experience.”

Hall, a three-sport athlete at Stonington and a member of the school’s most recently released honor roll, has been named The Day’s 2017 All-Area Girls’ Track & Field Athlete of the Year, having qualified for the New England championship meet for the second straight season.

Hall won the Eastern Connecticut Conference title in the 200 meters in 25.95 seconds and was second in the 100 (12.57). She was second in the Class M state championship in the 100 (12.83) and third in the 200 (26.65) and was sixth in the 100 at the State Open (12.62) to qualify her for the New England meet June 10 in Norwell, Mass.

She won the Class M 100 title last year in her first season competing in track and has continued to draw interest from colleges with her speed.

That’s on top of her roles as a midfielder for the girls’ soccer team — soccer was her first sport growing up — and as an All-ECC Division II point guard for the girls’ basketball team, a sport she’d someday like to coach thanks in part to Solar’s influence.

“She’s just gifted. She’s just naturally really fast,” said Ben Bowne, Stonington’s head boys’ track coach and sprints coach for both the boys’ and girls’ teams, speaking of Hall. “She’s competitive. That’s a big part of being a top-level sprinter. You step on the track and feel like you can beat anybody.

“Her first meet was at East Lyme. She crushed it. (East Lyme coach) Carl Reichard was like, ‘Whoa, who’s that?’ … She’s done really well. She’s really matured. She took a lead role in basketball, which helped. She’s one of those kids that leads by example.”

Hall’s competitive nature stems from having two older brothers, Bryan and Brandon, and their family basketball games — “it wasn’t a good enough game if I wasn’t crying,” she said. Her siblings, now in their 20s, challenged Hall to a 100-meter race this year on Easter, in fact (she declined).

It was at the Class M meet, May 30 at Willow Brook Park in New Britain, that Hall’s maturity took precedence over her outright competitiveness. Hall, racing against transgender female Andraya Yearwood, a freshman at Cromwell High School, was thrust onto the national stage as the fairness of the race came into question. Yearwood is a biological male who identifies as female, clearing her for competition under the jurisdiction of the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference.

Yearwood won the Class M 100- and 200-meter races, dethroning Hall as the 100 champ.

It didn’t sit well with the competitive Hall, mainly the part about finishing second. Hall wiped away tears. She called the situation “frustrating” in postrace interviews, but she maintained her poise, even as she wished she could stop seeing her name and face on Twitter several times per day. The story was carried by ESPN Radio and by WEEI radio in Boston and featured in a story by USA Today.

“I think people were nervous what I would say, but why would I do that to myself?” Hall said. “Why are we so shocked? I’ve grown up a lot. … Going in (to the race), I was fine. I thought, ‘There’s a chance I can beat her.’ If I had a good day, I was going to win. Then (when I lost), my phone was crazy and I hadn’t slept. I was stressed out.

“If I could run against her again, I definitely would.”

Bowne said the reaction to the story was extremely complimentary toward Hall.

“It was a new situation for all of us and she handled it really well,” Bowne said. “We all told her, ‘as much as you hated to lose, the way you handled it after the race, handled it with respect and class, you came out the big winner.’ How fast she ran, if people notice who she is and look into it a little bit … that says a lot about her character.”

Bowne was already familiar with Hall’s character and competitive nature.

She led the Bears to their second straight ECC Division II title, winning three events in a season-ending dual meet against Montville in which Stonington squeaked out a 78-72 victory. The Bears were then second at the ECC championship meet behind Division I power Norwich Free Academy.

“Kate comes every day, she works hard, she has a great rapport with her teammates. She wants to go out and compete,” Bowne said.

Hall has already begun playing summer league basketball. She regrets her freshman and sophomore years, she said, when most of the talking she did on the court was to referees. She’s deciding where to attend college and which sport she’d most like to play at the next level.

She knows that sports have opened a variety of doors for her.

“The amount of support I have is awesome,” Hall said. “There’s not one leader, one adult, one coach … I have a good relationship with everyone. People are supporting me.”

v.fulkerson@theday.com