NP Play is an exercise and sports related initiative intended to get elementary school kids active, and to encourage them to participate in organized sports at the high school level. My partners in this are soccer player Olivia Lambdin and basketball and softball player Katie Herron. We all agreed prior to pitch day that we wanted to do something related to sports and something where we could give back to the young student athletes in our community. We first wanted to do an all-sports kids camp. We planned to have multiple student athletes from all of the different sports run drills and games involved with their respective sport. As we began to plan this camp, logistically there were a lot of things we had to worry about. We were unsure of a timeframe or date for our project or exactly how and what we would do at the camp. With an all-day camp, we worried about keeping the attention of the student athletes and we worried about having enough volunteers to make it run smoothly. The biggest problem we faced was the liability concerns regarding potential injury. Because of all of these concerns, we pivoted our focus towards helping individual classrooms and trying to be positive role models for the next generation of Dragons. NP Play is modeled after the NFL's Play 60 campaign that tries to encourage kids to get out and be active. We presented our proposal to CSCSHC Administrators, explaining the lack of exercise in today's youth and the benefits of increased exercise. Mrs. Eastes, the principal of New Palestine Elementary presented us with her opinion on the issue. She said that students in our district get more exercise now than ever. However, she really like the idea of us being mentors and positive role models for the elementary school kids. So, we decided, that we would change our project to more of a leadership and mentoring program where we encourage kids to play sports for the character building benefits, as well as the positive health implications. Below I've attached the first lesson we gave to Mrs. Bowman's kindergarten class. First, we engaged the students by asking them what sports they like to play. Next, we explained some of the benefits to playing high school athletics. We then proceeded to walk the kids through all of the different opportunities they can have at the high school. For some popular sports, like football and soccer we included pictures and examples of student athletes at the high school. We also listed some of the less popular sports after the fact.
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Alex cottermanNPHS Senior, Football Player, Advocate for HS Athletics Archives
December 2018
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