When I look back on my leadership experiences, I would have to say my greatest leadership role was in high school on my basketball teams. My freshmen year, I was new to school and tried out for the team and I made it on the JV basketball team. Not too much time later I became the Captain of my team, being the leader of girls that were not only my age (freshmen) but also sophomores, juniors and seniors. They had to look to me to lead on the team and to support our team throughout the season. The next year, my sophomore year, I was on Varsity. I was voted most spirited and received coaches award my sophomore and junior year. Lastly my senior year, I was Varsity Captain. This was a great honor for me because I loved my teammates and was so passionate about our game, my girls and our success. At the beginning of the year, our team was struggling. We were really disheartened playing harder teams and not winning as much as we’d like. We were getting down on each other, and worse, getting down on ourselves. I saw this and it made me so upset to see our team so disheveled. I quickly started planning team meetings, mandatory team lunches on game days, and team pump up and cheers before games. In little to no time, our team was closer and hanging out all of the time together. We’d go out together to dinner the night before games and after games, have team sleepovers and pool parties, all of the bonding stuff a girls basketball team could do. One night I even decorated our locker room with posters of quotes and team goals for the year. I had a sharpie on the board and had the girls write a personal goal for themselves that year and for our team. My coach even pulled me a side after doing that because he was so proud. I hadn’t even told him I was doing it. It was a surprise to everyone and everyone seemed to be inspired by it. Later that year we got second place in our league, which sucked because we were so close to winning League, but went far into the playoffs. We got to semi-finals before we lost and my team made me the biggest posters for senior night, wrote me a huge message on this poster board explaining how much they would miss my leadership on the team. It made me cry because I knew that the girls would continue on the traditions I had started that year, and they have stuck even now. My younger sister is a junior on the team now and told me they still do all of the cheers, chants and pre-game rituals I started with my team in high school. It makes me happy to know that my leadership was appreciated, respected, admired and even lives on today. I know this isn’t a moment, but it was a season filled with moments that made up one of the best leadership experience of my life.
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