I was surprised when I was asked to interview for the position of editor of the Sports section of The Cor Chronicle. After all, I had very little experience with playing sports in middle or high school. The sports I did participate in, such as powerlifting and mixed martial arts, were largely self-contained and competition was purely optional.
Most of my exposure to high school competition came from my four seasons on a mock trial team in high school at the Trinity School at Greenlawn, going through fabricated legal cases based on real events and acting in the role of either an attorney or a witness. While teams from Trinity were largely competitive in the sense that we often had junior and senior teams make it to state or even national competitions, the sports environment was something that was outside my scope.
I would be lying if I said that the position was not a little intimidating. At the end of the day, what did I really know about sports? What did I know what life would be like for a student-athlete?
Luckily, what I did know was what it takes to sacrifice a lot of your time for something greater than yourself. I knew that being a team player, especially for an individualist, is not a transformation that happens overnight. You have to work at it to develop that quality in yourself. You have to learn how to work with people effectively, whether they are superiors or peers.
In the end, being a team player of any kind relies on essential communication skills and an understanding of people as striving for something excellent. Underneath all the statistics, the university politics, and the strategy of the games is a universal human factor. What I intend to do with the Sports section is to reflect that.
Without an enormous infrastructure of people, there would be no game to play. Players need coaches as much as coaches need players, and they all rely on effective administration to have a successful season. There are a lot of hands at work in the athletics department, and rather than let them get lost in the fog of ‘just another thing we do’ at the University of Dallas, I want to shine a light on the backgrounds and unique skills of as many people as I can.
A basketball team is made up of more than just the sum of its parts; the people involved aren’t just contributors to the scoreboard. Every single player, coach, and administrator comes from somewhere. Something along the line triggered their interest and inspired them to get involved with athletics, using their skills not only for their own sake, but also for the formation of a good team and a good department overall. Sportsmanship is a vocational sort of work.
I look forward to helping the athletes and coaches bring attention to topics and stories that make them who they are, whether that be in the form of game coverage, interviews, or discussions on student life. In other words, I am looking forward to being a team player in whatever way I can.