How sports helped my daughter

By Joyce Tso, mother of Olivia, who just graduated and Michelle, who graduated last year. In this blog entry, Joyce reflects on Olivia's St. Mary's career and how it made her who she is today.

As mother of Olivia, I was surprised to see Olivia’s willingness to write for the blog and amazed to see her enthusiasm and encouragement to her peers to start playing sports at a young age. It is a big stepping stone for my careless minded Olivia.

Last week, she wrote “Playing sports is so much fun and you never know what potential you have until you go out and do it! It can give you so much more confidence in your abilities. Without sports I probably wouldn’t be the person I am today.” So I wanted to share some of Olivia’s stories on how sports helped her become an organized, passionate, confident and responsible young lady.

Learning in academics is important, especially for a first generation Chinese family; we always focus at academics achievements. Learning in academics is a lifetime journey.

But learning in sports is critical as well. It builds a person’s character, most notably time management, teamwork and the ability to deal with pressure.

Because Olivia played basketball, volleyball and baseball for both St. Mary’s and outside clubs, she had to be very organized in even the little things like keeping uniforms separate. She has a white board to write down to remind herself that different bags hold different uniforms and shoes.

She has to stay on top of practice and game times minimize the time conflicts. She needs to know each game site address so she can get to a right location.

Before, Olivia, my youngest daughter, used to have that “I don’t care and I don’t know” attitude. These characteristics drove me nuts when I compared her to my older daughter Michelle, who was disciplined and determined as a competitive figure skater.

But the more she took on her own responsibilities playing sports, she changed from “a don’t care and don’t know kid” to a motivated responsible young lady with a sense of good time management.

Experience and learning in sports also translated to her work academically. Simply by playing sports, she easily answered all the essay questions in her high school applications.

Olivia was asked in her essay question for her S.I. application to name someone who influenced her life. She responded by saying her sister Michelle, who encouraged her to be more of a team leader for her 6th grade basketball team. She cited this as an example of how she put her sister’s words into action.

“Before that I would pass the ball like a hot potato. I was afraid that people would yell at me if I made a mistake. After that I learned to pass when I needed to, to select a receiver, to call for the ball and even to make a shoot”.

For her application for school in Minnesota, she was asked to explain something she tried,but wasn’t successful at, and how she changed as a person. She wrote about her experience playing volleyball.

“When I first started playing, I thought I was terrible and would be the worst player on the team. A couple weeks into the season, I was still doing terrible and I wanted to quit. After some struggles, I decided not to give up. I even asked my Mom to buy a volleyball for me so I could practice at home. Not giving up was worth it. At the end of volleyball season, I was the team captain and was selected to represent St. Mary’s in the CYO Volleyball All-Star Achievement Game.”

And as she goes to Minnesota for school in September, some things that will stick out most for me are our times talking to each other when we were driving from Point A to Point B, listening to her analyze how she could’ve better played a better game. I got to know her better and communicate with her in all aspects of her life and patiently saw her morph from a caterpillar to a beautiful butterfly.

Last but not the least; it truly takes a village to raise a child. Thank you to St. Mary teachers, faculty members and all the coaches to help our family raise Olivia. It is just a starting point for Olivia as St. Mary’s has prepared Olivia well for her future challenges.