Has it really been four years already?
I know it’s a cliche to say that time flies, but these past four years to me have only felt like seconds. So much has happened and so much has changed, but the bottom line is that everything happens for a reason.
“Everything happens for a reason” is the one line that I would say perfectly encapsulates my high school experience. Coming in as a Freshman and dealing with the whole COVID fiasco was hard on everyone. We had to learn to adapt with technology and new social norms, and a whole new way of life. It even affected athletics and how they were run.
Going into freshman year I knew I wanted to play volleyball, and let me tell you that the Saint Charles North Girls Volleyball program changed my life. I had played travel volleyball for at least 4 years before that and I played on the middle school team for both 7th and 8th grade, but in high school volleyball I found my second home. Coach Hawkins, Hawk as we call her, and the rest of the coaching staff, took a little girl who could barely control her limbs, and they turned her into the person and player I am today. Hawk was also my Freshman year English teacher and played a huge role in why I am choosing to pursue English in college. I found a family through that program and it is a huge part of my life that I will never forget.
As a sophomore I made the varsity team, and as an underclassman I understood that my chances of playtime were pretty slim. I sat on the bench game after game, and never complained or got mad. Fast forward in the season and it comes time to play our friends from across the river. Unbeknownst to us, one of our starters came down with COVID and couldn’t make it. The crowd and the environment in the gym was electric, and I got my chance to play that game. Everything happens for a reason. We won in three sets and that day a core memory was created.
Sophomore year was also when I found Stargazer. Mrs. Froemling, our former advisor, was my English teacher that year and she pushed me to join the club. Even knowing how busy I was with volleyball, she still urged me to come after I was done with the season. I went to that meeting the first Monday after we finished and I ended up taking my first assignment. It was a competition for a gallery: whoever got the most responses with photos for the gallery got a prize. Me and my competitive nature took the challenge and I got my candy prize, but It wasn’t the prize that I was in for, it was the journalistic aspect. A couple meetings later I wrote my first story, a sports story of course, and I fell in love with it. I wrote an article about a north graduate who was the only current female head athletic trainer in the NBA at the time, and I knew that I found my passion. The following year I applied to be the sports editor and the rest is history.
Every step that you take, every decision that you make, is building you up to become the best version of yourself. Life is just one big game of trial and error. You are going to have setbacks, you are going to make the wrong decisions and you are going to fail sometimes, but that’s okay. Everything happens for a reason, you need to trust in yourself and believe that everything will work out, because it will, and it will allow you to discover your truth, your passion, and who you are.
