South Lakes won back-to-back VHSL Class 6 state championships in boys basketball in 2024 and 2025, the first two in school history. If you moved to Reston in the last couple of years, you arrived in the middle of one of the better runs a local program has put together, and you may still be trying to work out where the gym is.
This page covers what a year of Seahawk athletics looks like. What sports the school fields, when tryouts happen, who the teams play, how families buy tickets and get involved, and which neighborhoods feed the program. We update it at the start of each season.
The basics
South Lakes High School sits at 11400 South Lakes Drive in Reston, in the heart of South Reston near Lake Thoreau. The main number is 703-715-4500. The mascot is the Seahawk. The school competes in VHSL Class 6, the largest enrollment classification in Virginia, as a member of the Concorde District.
The Concorde District also includes Centreville, Chantilly, James Madison, Oakton, and Westfield. That membership shapes most of the schedule, and it comes with a wrinkle worth knowing. Herndon High School, seven miles up the road, is not in the Concorde District. Herndon moved to the Liberty District in 2017. The two schools still play each other, but as a non-district game rather than a district title fight.
Athletics and activities run out of the Student Activities office. Andrew Duggan is the Director of Student Activities at 703-715-4518, and Sierra Traynham is the assistant director at 703-715-4524. For rosters, live schedules, and forms, the school points families to the Seahawk athletics site at southlakesathletics.net. Use it rather than a national aggregator. When we cross-checked the two while building our weekly scoreboard, the aggregator had home and away reversed on eight upcoming games and listed one match that appeared on no school calendar at all.
Every sport, by season
South Lakes fields a wide slate, including several sports that arrived recently.
Fall. Cheerleading, cross country, dance, field hockey, football, golf (co-ed and girls), girls volleyball, boys volleyball, and girls flag football.
Winter. Boys and girls basketball, dance, gymnastics, indoor track and field, swim and dive, and wrestling.
Spring. Baseball, softball, boys and girls lacrosse, boys and girls soccer, boys and girls tennis, track and field, and crew.
The school also competes in VHSL activities that sit alongside athletics and run on the same competitive calendar: eSports, debate, forensics, scholastic bowl, and theatre one act. Families who want their student in a competitive team environment without a ball involved have real options here.
Two additions are worth calling out. Girls flag football is among the newest VHSL-sanctioned sports in Virginia, and South Lakes fields a girls varsity team. Crew launched in spring 2026 as the school’s first rowing program.
Flag football runs on its own calendar, and families who assume it follows the rest of the fall season will miss most of it. The 2026 schedule opens Tuesday, September 29 at Meridian and closes Tuesday, November 3 at Westfield, with a five-team circle of opponents that includes Chantilly, Westfield, and Meridian. Most games start at 8:00 p.m., after the fields clear. Home dates at South Lakes are October 6 against Chantilly and a doubleheader on October 27, with Chantilly at 6:00 and a second opponent at 8:00.
Two of those nights are stacked. October 21 puts South Lakes in two games at Meridian an hour apart. A sport where a team can play twice in an evening is worth seeing once even if your family has no one on the roster.
The crew program is new, and it has a good origin story
South Lakes rowed its first season in spring 2026 under first-year coach Erich Hoefer, a Georgetown rowing graduate, with parent Konrad Huppi assisting. The program got its opening when Westfield’s crew dissolved in 2025 and freed up storage at Bull Run Marina. With help from VASRA leadership and established local coaches, South Lakes filled the gap.
The logistics are a commitment. Rowers train three days a week and ride roughly thirty minutes to Bull Run Marina for water time. Regattas run nearly every spring weekend on the Occoquan at Sandy Run. The boosters expected more than twenty students in year one, enough for boys and girls varsity eights.
For families moving here from rowing regions, the short version is that crew exists at South Lakes now, it is young, and a program in its second year is a place where a committed athlete can matter early.
Cross country races in Reston
Most South Lakes teams travel to compete. Cross country is the exception that Reston families can walk to. District meets run at Lake Fairfax Park, and both the Concorde and Liberty schools use it, on different nights in the same week. The Concorde meet drew South Lakes, Centreville, and Chantilly in the first week of September 2026, and the Liberty meet the following afternoon brought Herndon, Washington-Liberty, and Langley to the same course.
The school calendars list these as away games because South Lakes is not the host, which hides the fact that the race happens two miles from the school. Admission is free, the course is walkable from the parking lot, and it is one of the easier ways to see what a high school sport looks like here before your student commits to one.
Tryout dates
Mark these. Missing a tryout window usually means waiting a full year.
- Fall sports: tryouts begin August 3, 2026
- Winter sports: tryouts begin November 9, 2026
- Spring sports: tryouts begin February 22, 2027
Before a student can try out, FCPS requires a current physical on the state form along with the online registration and consent paperwork. Virginia uses its own form and its own timing, so paperwork that cleared at a school in another state will not carry over. Handle it in July, not the week tryouts open.
Football, and the game to circle
Football drives the fall calendar. The 2026 Seahawk schedule runs from an August 28 opener at Yorktown through a November 6 finish at Westfield, with Concorde District play filling October.
The date worth putting on the family calendar is Friday, October 2, when Herndon comes to South Lakes. It is the only football meeting of the two schools all season, it is at home, and it draws the biggest crowd of the year outside the playoffs. If you are new to the area and want one night that explains how these two communities relate to each other, that is the one.
The two schools do meet more often than the football schedule suggests. They played twice in volleyball in the opening week of the 2026 season, boys in Herndon and girls in Reston, and field hockey brings Herndon back to South Lakes at the end of August. Different districts keep them apart in the standings, not on the calendar.
Getting in the door
Ticketing for FCPS athletic events runs through digital ticketing rather than cash at the gate for most events. Buy before you leave the house. Gates for football typically open well ahead of a 7:00 p.m. kickoff, and parking at South Lakes fills from the main lot outward on big nights.
We are building a separate guide to parking, gates, and ticketing for every stadium in the Reston and Herndon area, and we will link it here when it publishes.
The Boosters are how families plug in
The South Lakes Boosters is a volunteer organization supporting the Activities Office and more than twenty athletic teams. Membership money and concession revenue go toward facility improvements, uniforms, equipment, technology, student scholarships, and coaches training.
They meet the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 p.m. in the Career Center, and the May meeting doubles as the annual meeting where officers are elected. For a family that just moved to Reston and wants to meet people quickly, a booster meeting is a more efficient path than most. Everyone in that room has a kid at the school and a reason to talk to you.
Which neighborhoods feed the program
FCPS assigns students by home address, not by ZIP code or mailing city. The unit that matters is the pyramid. Addresses in the South Lakes pyramid attend Langston Hughes Middle School and then South Lakes High School. We cover the academic side of that in our full guide to South Lakes High School.
Reston addresses do not all feed to South Lakes. Several pyramids overlap this part of Fairfax County, and the lines run through neighborhoods and occasionally through individual streets. A house on one block can feed South Lakes while a house two streets away feeds somewhere else.
If your child playing for a particular program matters to you, verify the address itself in the FCPS School Locator before you write an offer. We have had this conversation with enough buyers to know that a listing description is not a source.
One more wrinkle for 2026-27. Skyview High School opened this fall in Herndon with grades 9 and 10, and it is not a VHSL member school this year. Students enrolled at Skyview play VHSL sports at their base school, with FCPS providing afternoon transportation to get them there. A South Lakes pyramid family that opted into Skyview still has a Seahawk athlete. FCPS plans to seek VHSL membership for Skyview starting in 2027-28, and at that point those students compete for Skyview instead.
The alumni wall is unusual for a public high school
South Lakes has sent an odd number of people to the top of their sports.
Grant Hill played here before Duke and eighteen NBA seasons. Alan Webb ran a 3:53.43 mile as a South Lakes senior in 2001, a time that rewrote the American high school record book. Maame Biney went from Reston to the 2018 Winter Olympics in short track speed skating. Derek Lee and Wyatt Toregas reached the major leagues, Deon King and Thomas Mayo reached the NFL, and Karen Reyes has played for El Salvador’s women’s national team.
The detail we like best is that Christy Winters-Scott, who calls basketball for NBC, coaches the South Lakes girls team. Students here are coached by someone who does the sport for a living at the national level.
Following along
Schedules move. Weather moves them more. The live schedule lives at southlakesathletics.net, and it is the version to trust when a third-party site disagrees. We publish a scoreboard roundup each week during the season covering South Lakes and the other area high schools, along with the coming week’s home games.
If you are moving to Reston and trying to work out whether your student lands in this program, start with the address. Everything else follows from there.
