The 2025 Vermont Principals’ Association spring sports playoff pairings are out! Here’s a look at the first round and the byes for Franklin County high schools. The dates for the first round and the byes have been established, but the times for all the games have not. Please visit ScorebookLive.com for more information.

D1 Softball

No. 1 BFA-St. Albans Comets have a bye in the first round and will play the winner of No. 8 South Burlington/No. 9 North Country on June 6 at 4:30 p.m.

No. 7 Missisquoi Valley Union hosts No. 10 Champlain Valley Union on June 4.

D2 Softball

No. 5 Enosburg hosts No. 12 Spaulding on June 4.

D3 Softball

No. 2 BFA-Fairfax hosts the No.7 Fair Haven/10 Paine Mountain winner on June 6.

D4 Softball

No. 4 Blue Mountain hosts No. 5 Richford on June 5.

SOUTH BURLINGTON – The 2025 Vermont girls tennis individual championships involved girls from just two schools with representatives from Champlain Valley facing off against opponents from Mount Mansfield.

The schools managed to split the championships at The EDGE in South Burlington on Saturday, May 31 to conclude the three-day individual tournament before team playoffs begin the first week of June.

Bea Molson book ends career with another championship

Three years ago, Mount Mansfield’s Bea Molson became the first Cougar to win a girls tennis individual championship as a freshman. Molson had not earned a spot again in the singles championship match until her senior season. The Cougar suffered losses in the quarterfinals in 2023 and the semifinals in 2024 to eventual champion Anna Dauerman of Champlain Valley.

Molson entered the 2025 individual tournament as the top seed after winning all 11 regular-season matches. There the senior earned her redemption, defeating third-seeded Dauerman 6-4, 6-3 capturing her second individual title in her high school career.

“(My strategy was) just to keep the play going and hit it behind her to hit winners and just focus on the ball and hit it deep,” Molson said.

Champlain Valley’s Ariel Toohey finally wins doubles championship

For the last two years, CVU’s Ariel Toohey and her former partner Addie Maurer lost in the doubles finals match to Stowe’s Gabby Doehla and Katie Tilgner. With Doehla and Tilgner graduated, Toohey had a chance.

The senior had a new partner in sophomore Rylee Makay. Both Toohey and Makay play mostly singles for CVU, so the start of the individual tournament was the first time they played doubles together.

Despite not having on-the-court chemistry prior to the tournament, Toohey and Makay found a groove that continued into the finals match. Toohey and Makay defeated MMU’s Estelle First and Ava Poehlmann, 7-6, 3-6, 10-4 in a three-set thriller giving the senior the title she fell short of for the past two springs.

“Definitely super satisfying, especially in my senior year,” Toohey said. “It was good to have a new opponent and a new partner and just a fresh start.”

Toohey and Makay immediately clicked and their cohesion was evident during the first two days of the tournament. Toohey and Makay won their first three matchups in straight sets to book a spot in the finals.

In the third set tiebreaker, the Redhawks won the first three points and managed to hold the Cougars off helping CVU win its seventh overall girls doubles championship and first since 2018.

Toohey and Makay gained confidence after winning the first set tiebreaker that carried them to their third set victory.

“I feel like we didn’t put too much pressure on ourselves going into it,” Toohey said. “We knew we had nothing to lose because we didn’t have a reputation as a double team, so we kind of gave it our all.”

Contact Judith Altneu at jaltneu@gannett.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @Judith_Altneu.

MONTPELIER — After a drawn-out day of disagreements and false starts, the Vermont Legislature bailed on its plan to wrap up business for the year on Friday, failing to come to a deal, at least for now, on this year’s landmark education reform bill.

So strained were the talks, the House and Senate couldn’t even immediately agree on when negotiations would continue.

The Senate gaveled out for the night shortly after 11 p.m. Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden Central, told his colleagues that coming to an agreement needed more time, and the Senate would instead gavel back in at 2 p.m. Saturday.

“We’re going home now,” Baruth said. 

Soon after, around 11:30 p.m., the House adjourned until Monday at noon. From there, House Speaker Jill Krowinski, D-Burlington, said the chamber would be holding brief sessions without taking any actions, known as “token sessions,” until mid-June. That’s when legislators had previously penciled in to hold votes to override potential vetoes by Gov. Phil Scott.  

“We’ve been putting compromises on the table all day, trying to find a path forward,” Krowinski said in an interview after ending her chamber’s business for the night. “This is a top priority for this legislative session, and we have to get it right. And at the end of the day, everyone was feeling like it needed more time.”

Legislative leaders said they expect the joint House and Senate panel hashing out the education bill, H.454, to continue meeting in the coming weeks, though the schedule was not immediately clear.

Both chambers signed off on a handful of other bills Friday, including sweeping housing legislation that would set out a program to finance infrastructure around new developments, a bill that would make it harder for neighbors to sue farmers over impacts the farm may have on their properties, and other bills on motor vehicles, cannabis and drug price caps.

However, the outcome leaves the session’s highest-profile work unfinished. Following an election where property tax rates drove voters, leading to a wave of Republican victories in the House and Senate, Democratic legislative leadership pledged to heed voters’ call for a more affordable education system. 

Yet four months in, the path toward that future state remained murky.

The parties began Friday closer than they ended it. Early in the day, the House and Senate conference committee members appeared to reach some tentative agreements on H.454. But as the hours wore on, negotiations — at least in public — faltered. The committee had been unable to lock in key details. Left unsettled was which funding formula to use, what to do about school choice and private schools and how to limit spending before school districts consolidate down the road. 

Meetings of the conference committee — three senators and three house members — were continuously postponed. Legislators and legislative staff scrambled in and out of rooms. Lobbyists lingered in the halls. As the conference committee drifted further and further from either chamber’s original position, the possibility of explaining the hugely complex and fast-changing piece of legislation to 180 lawmakers looked near-impossible. 

The vast majority of lawmakers dawdled as the conference committee worked in fits and starts, with people playing cards and sipping drinks throughout the Statehouse. 

The House, Senate and Scott have made education reform the year’s key issue. All three parties agreed on the need to consolidate school districts and transition the state to a new funding formula. But for months, the parties have reached little consensus on the intricacies and the timeline of that generational transformation. 

Baruth had told his chamber around 10 p.m. that agreement still looked possible.

“It’s frustrating,” he said on the floor, describing the delay, “but the way I think about it is, your constituents and my constituents sent us here for this night because they want us to do our work, they want us to finish it up, pay strict attention and then be done and go home.”

That proved overly optimistic.