SAFUN

Happy New Year!

So what’s new for 2010? I am coaching my first volleyball team! This is something I have always wanted to do but never ran into the opportunity. When my aunt contacted me about a volleyball club needing a volleyball coach for a 12 & under team, I jumped on it. I’m passionate about the sport and passionate about working with our youth so I felt this was my calling.

I can’t tell you how nervous I was meeting the parents. I have been in business for 7 years and have had to present to high profile clients and executive leadership numerous of times but never was I this nervous. These parents were meeting someone for the first time that would be working with their daughter for the next 6 months. I needed to earn their trust. Talking a bit about my experience helped. The next step was proving myself.

I outlined what I was going to go over in my first practice and reviewed it over and over and over and over in my head. Once practice came and I started running the drills, I realized that I was way ahead of myself. These girls are only 9 and 10 years old! I needed to teach them the fundamentals of just passing the ball and controlling the ball. I had to go back and re-outline my practices. I now have the hang of it.

Our first tournament was this past weekend. We are in the 12 & under division so I knew we were going up against girls that were older than my girls and had 1 year under their belt in club volleyball. Mentally, I was prepared for this. Was I prepared for our opposing team to be twice the size of my team? No! I showed up at 7:30am to see a bunch of mammoths warming up. I only had a few girls there and we were scheduled to play at 8am, against the mammoths! My poor parents were so freaked out. I kept my composure. I got my girls warmed up and ready to play. We had to play them so there was no use in freaking out. And although we lost, we took the mammoths to 3 games. Not bad.

We went on to lose 1 more match but won our last match, yeah! I was so exhausted by the end of our last match. I had such a blast and left with an amazing feeling inside. We are only going to get better and now, I actually want to play some more mammoths.

This year, it’s not about my success. For me, it’s about helping my girls succeed.

My cousin, Renee, a senior at O’Connor high school played for the varsity volleyball team this past season. They beat Reagan, making them number 1 in the city.  They made it to the final four for the 5A State Championship, beating a team from the valley. They went up against Austin Westlakes, a team that had won the IV-5A title the past 2 years. This was new for O’Connor and I am so happy Renee had the opportunity to make it that far. It will be an experience she will never forget. She is #5 on the far right. Go Renee! Read the full article here.

Sexting has become more and more common among our youth.  They think that sending a nude or semi nude photo of themselves to one person will stay with that one person and don’t realize the risk of it being sent out to others. The first time I realized the seriousness of sexting was when I saw a case being featured on the Today Show. An 18 year old girl sent a nude photo of herself to her boyfriend. Once they broke up, that photo was sent out to everyone at her school. She was humiliated and bullied for a year before she ended up committing suicide. Our legal system is really trying to crack down on this. If you are a minor (18 years or younger), creating, transmitting, and even possessing a nude, seminude, or sexually explicit image of yourself can be considered child pornography. It can be prosecuted as a state or federal felony and can even lead to having to register as a sex offender. While I do agree there should be legal consequences,  I’m unsure if it should be filed as child pornography. Our youth does need to understand that sexting is unacceptable behavior and there are laws in place to protect them.  In spite of all our work trying to stop sexting, we allow a song like “LOL, Smiley Face” on the radio for our youth to listen to. Here’s a snapshot of the lyrics (click here for all the lyrics):

I Love Fisher Price

See now my shorty text me, send your boy a smiley face.

Gucci-Mane X-Rated, we could make a sex tape

Pics on my iPhone, Gucci on her iPod

When she turn around, *** make you say, oh God

Am I the only one that seems something wrong with this?

I am sure everyone has already heard about this but I had to post about it because I just think it’s so cool. Google runs a contest called “Doodle 4 Google.” It’s a competition that invites K-12 grade students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo around a preselected theme.

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. Both our country and our world are undergoing significant change and this year we invited students to doodle around the theme “What I Wish for the World”. At Google we believe in thinking big, and dreaming big, and we can’t think of anything more important than encouraging students to do the same.

And the winner? Christin Engelberth, a 6th grader from Bernard A. Harris Jr High School right here in San Antonio Texas. She titled her’s a “A New Beginning”:

My doodle, “A new beginning,” expresses my wish that in the current crisis discoveries will be made. That in these discoveries solutions will be found to help the Earth prosper once more. That those solutions will help the world get back on its feet, and create a better place for everyone.

The logo is being displayed today on Google’s homepage where millions of visitors come from all over the world. Christin will receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop, and a $25,000 technology grant for her school.

She has been featured on many news websites including CNN:

A panel of independent judges and Google employees, along with close to 6 million online voters, disagreed, and chose her sketch as the overall winner from a field of over 28,000 other submissions.

Good job Christin! Way to represent San Antonio, your school and most importantly, yourself. This is awesome news and news we need to hear about more often. There are kids doing wonderful things out there and they need to be recognized.

I applaud Google for developing a program that recognizes our youth for their talent and creativity. We need more companies to be doing things like this. We also need to encourage our youth to search for competitions, programs and contests that challenge them to use their brains.

I am going to print this story and take it my class at Garner middle school, where I am a Junior Achievement volunteer. I want our kids to know that there are programs out there where they can get recognized for their talents. I hope this story will inspire them.

I am a Junior Achievement (JA) volunteer and I started this semester’s program 3 weeks ago.

JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.

I was a Program Assistant for PREP (PreFreshman Engineering Program) back in 2001 and this was when I discovered my passion to inspire our youth. When I started working at Rackspace back in 2003, I was introduced to Junior Achievement. I love Junior Achievement because it allows me to take business practices from my work life and share it with students. Students are learning their basics in school – which is needed – but they need to understand how it pertains to the real world.

As members of this community, I feel that it is our responsibility to inspire our youth. We can’t leave it up to only our teachers. I know that I would have never gotten to where I am at today without certain individuals inspiring me throughout my childhood and young adulthood. I am still being inspired, not only by accomplished individuals but from our youth. I learn so much from the students I teach.

This semester, I am working with middle school students.  It’s something about this age group that I feel like I can connect to the most, more so than elementary or high school.

The topic for this semester is Entrepreneurship. Yay! My favorite!

The first day I met  with the students, I was so nervous! I got all these butterflies in my stomach. I kept thinking “will they like me?” “will they listen to what I have to say?” “do they care?”  I had done this before but when you meet a new set of students, it’s like going in for an interview.

No matter what, I had to come in very confident. They needed to know that I knew what the heck I was talking about. I am already young so sometimes I may not be taken seriously.

I first had to introduce myself and let everyone know what I did for a living. We were going to go over the basics of Entrepreneurship. Then we were going to play a game, structured like Jeopardy, where I gave them hints of CEO’s and/or companies and they had to guess the name.

I had a very energetic group of kids. It took them a while to settle down. I introduced myself and explained what I did. I educated them a little about the Internet. As soon as I mentioned YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, their attention level went straight to 100%. These were things they knew about and could relate to. I talked about the founders of these companies and how they had a vision. They loved it!

Phew! I was in. We went on to play our game and not only did they learn but I actually learned about CEO’s I didn’t know of before.

Last week, they had an exercise to develop a blueprint of their Teen Club. This was essentially teaching them how to build a business and think of ways that they would sell it – who would come and how much it would be. They designed their entire Teen Club.

This past week, they created slogans and commercials for a  preselected product. These were products that were unheard of and weren’t necessarily real. The products we used were spray on pantyhose, an alarm watch that only woke you up when it sensed you had enough sleep and then programmable paints for your home. All were real products except the programmable paint (which makes me think…).

They were so creative! They came up with slogans and even promotions. They are very smart kids. I hope they remember the lessons we are learning:

1. Fill a Need
2. Know your Product and Customer
3. Be Creative and Innovative
4. Believe in Yourself

(Sometimes real world businesses need to be reminded of these basics.)

More updates to come as we continue our sessions.