Sunday, April 22, 2012

Determination

This past week we had a watermelon eating contest at the Boys and Girls Club.  Everyone was added into a drawing and were selected by age group to compete in the watermelon eating contest.  There were four different age groups, but unfortunately there was not a 20-30 age group so instead of participating I led the kids in cheering on each of their age groups. After the contestants were chosen they each were given close to a quarter of a watermelon to complete.  Once the whistle was blown and the contestants began to gobble up their watermelon the entire club was overwhelmed by cheers and screams by the audience.  The participants each had a different technique to try and complete the watermelon the quickest. 


In the end the older age groups came out as the winners.  The contest had been over for close to ten minutes when I looked in the corner and a little boy in the 6-8 age group was still working on his watermelon.  I watched as one of the teachers let the little boy know that the watermelon eating contest was done and that he didn’t have to finish the watermelon. He continued to press forward and was going to finish that watermelon no matter how long it took him to complete it.  After another ten minutes passed he finally finished the watermelon and held it proudly over his head!  He looked incredibly proud.  He had done it.  Sometimes it is not always about being in first place, but instead being determined enough to finish. 
getting ready to dive in!
The winners!

Sunday, April 8, 2012

SportFit!

I remember in high school it was not very cool to be a female jock.  I struggled with wanting to be apart of the popular crowd, but identifying with the athletes.  For the males the popular crowd and the jocks were one in the same, but this was completely different for the females and decreased the amount of females to participate in sports.  My senior year I was one of two seniors on the track team mostly because it was not popular to spend time competing in sports.  I have always been very competitive and passionate about sports, so it was no surprise that in high school that I wanted to pursue college athletics. I knew I had to get stronger and faster in order for me to be competitive at the college level.  For this reason I decided to train at Chico State with a group of high school athletes in a program called SportFit.  SportFit was my first experience with Olympic lifting and really helped me transition from high school athlete to college athlete.    

I was incredibly excited to be able to come back to Chico and work with the athletes at SportFit.   I was even more excited to see more than a handful of female athletes in the gym working hard to get stronger and more explosive.  This is such a positive change from when I participated in SportFit and was the only female athlete.  I learned an incredible amount from Steve Henderson and his crew at SportFit and I was able to put my college degree and my National Strength and Conditioning Certification to use.  I hope when I am back in Chico again I can continue to work with the athletes at Sportfit.  I enjoyed working with all the athletes but I was mostly pleased to see the increase of interest from female athletes.