Since I was a little kid sports have always interested me. I loved watching them and playing them. They have had a large impact on me and helped me in a lot of different ways. I believe that they can help others, too. I believe that every kid should get involved in an extracurricular activity during their high school career.

As I’ve gotten older I have begun to notice a lot of new things. There are situations that I now can understand and form an opinion about. Most of all I have really noticed all the social and teamwork skills I have gained from my time in sports. When I was younger there weren’t very many youth sport programs in the Neah-Kah-Nie area. So I had to go to the Tillamook YMCA, where I didn’t know anybody, to play sports. I was just a little kid from a place most of the other kids hadn’t even heard of. I think it was a very good experience for me because it taught me how to meet new people at a very young age, how to work as a team with people that I wasn’t to familiar with, and most of all it taught me how to become a leader. Playing sports at not only a young age but in an unfamiliar setting really helped me gain skills that have benefitted me in my life ever since.

A University of Illinois professor of human and community development recently did some research involving sophomore students. She found that kids who, rated by their teachers, had good social skills and work habits also participated in some sort of extracurricular activity. These kids made more money and reached a higher level of schooling ten years later than those kids who had very similar test scores but did not participate in extracurricular activities and lacked social skills. While getting good test scores and grades in school is very important our system doesn’t look at the social aspect of it all. Employers these days are beginning to look at a potential employee’s ability to communicate with the public and their fellow co-workers more so than how high of an SAT score they got. Leadership is not as big of a piece anymore. It’s more so how you can work as a team. I believe that you can gain valuable social and teamwork skills from extracurricular activities that will last a lifetime.

When I was in 7th grade our middle school finally got a baseball program. I was one of the only kids who had played baseball before. Our team was not very good or organized but it still did a lot for some of the kids on the team. I remember very specifically one time we were giving a kid a ride home from a game. Now this kid wasn’t exactly an angel. He got in a lot of trouble at school and I usually didn’t associate myself with him. We were talking about the team and how things weren’t going too well. But then I remember the kid saying something. Something that really made me think.

“You know being apart of this team really means something to me,” he said as he looked out the window. “Just the fact that I get to play on this team means a whole lot more than winning or losing.”

At that moment I realized something. Although it is really nice to win and succeed in your activities, you can get so much more out of it than just that.

All of these experiences have taught me a lot over the years. There is more to school than just learning and getting good grades; there is a much larger social piece to it that I believe can help us a lot more than learning how to graph exponential functions. I believe that extracurricular activities have given me some of the most important skills for the long road ahead of me .