Initially written as the third newsletter as an exchange student, May 2018.
Playing sports become a culture of American high school student everywhere. Most of schools and clubs offer a wide variety of sports, on every season. From the beginner, junior varsity, until the varsity level, sports unite every people from different backgrounds. The euphoria for sports happen not only for the players on the team, but also for the parents, coaches, cheerleaders, friends, marching bands, or just the fan of the sports itself. For this reason, I was joining a Native American sport called Lacrosse on early spring while I’m here. There’s not a lot of people outside the United States know or even play lacrosse. I may not know if my host brother and host sister aren’t playing the lacrosse. Even my school doesn’t have any team sport because of the small number of students. I’m also not a sport kind of person, except that I did a Physical Education classes before. Despite the lack of knowledge, experience, and the ability to play this, I encouraged myself to join this fun sport. I signed up with my host sister and brother for North Kitsap team at Poulsbo, the town beside my host town. Lacrosse is a simple but tricky sport. It requires twelve people on the team including one goalie for the goal, defenders, midfielders, and attackers. The goal of the sport is simple –shot as many ball to the goal with stick as possible. Yes, we use stick to catch and throw the ball. Also, since I’m on girl team, we only need goggles and mouth guard to protect ourselves; the game is pretty rough if you aren’t strong enough to be on the “fight”. But, that’s the fun part of lacrosse. Some basic skills that I learned so far is cradling the ball (or trying to keep the ball inside the net stick), throwing, ground ball, shooting, and checking the stick. It does take time to finally able to master these. I personally choose to do lacrosse as my sport because I want to know more people. I don’t have much friends outside school beside my neighbors and exchange friends, so I think lacrosse will provide me the chance for meeting new people. In fact, all of the girls on lacrosse are super nice and willing to help me learn lacrosse. Sometimes, after the lacrosse finish, we have time to just sit down and talk about our life and interests. Since I join the team by Parks and Recreation Department club Poulsbo, we come from many schools in Poulsbo. Spending time with them makes me understand two different environments in public school and my private school. From playing lacrosse, I learn lots of new things. The sport, of course, it’s the experience I may never do it again back home. The friendship created from the weekly practices that we have. Also, persistence and motivation for doing routine exercises. The time management ability, divides time for host family, host school, and exchange students’ activities. The last but not the least is that I become part of the American culture. It has been almost ten months of my existence in the Uncle Sam nation, time flies so fast. Being part of Americans builds my respects toward different customs. I slowly accustomed to their daily life, as well as what I do for lacrosse. This is one of the reasons why I feel that exchange students program is important: it introduces me to so many new experiences that I won’t experience back home, opens a broader understanding of the world and the society, and also fun time. Thank you for everything, for everyone who involved in my journey a year being an exchange student in the United States. I appreciate all your help for me. In the future, I hope that what I’ve learned here will be important experience to consider later in life.
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