YOUR STORIES: Finding the Team in Travel

*This week Carolina High School is honoring CYLT with their travel stories.Today, Tyisha Sanders takes us along on a visit to Clemson University.

Image courtesy of Tyisha Sanders

I'm a junior at Carolina High School in Greenville, South Carolina. Recently, the students in our school’s magnet health program got the opportunity to go and stay on the Clemson University campus for one week. As I'm part of that program, I knew this was going to be fun!

During that week, we got to learn more about how to work as a team instead of always making things a competition, something teenagers often do. 

Image by blahedo (Own work (photo by me)) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

When we first got to campus, our group registered, then went to unpack in our rooms.  Next, we played fun activities in the field.  After that was dinner, followed by hanging out in the free time room before bedtime.

Image by Snežana Trifunović (selfa-made) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

The next day, when I woke up I got prepared to go into the woods for that day’s activity.  As we were hiking in, I wondered: “Why are we going so far into the woods?” I soon found out. 

When we reached a specific location, we were told to form a circle. We did cool partner handshakes with each other…

Image from http://hooptricks.org/you-know-youre-a-hooper-when/

Afterwards, we watched one of the instructors put down Hula hoops and place tennis balls inside them. The instructions were to get all of the tennis balls into our group's hula hoops by taking them from the other teams.  The coordinator said “Start!” and immediately I thought “This is a competition.”

Image by Christopher Johnson (Flickr: IMG_6896_2) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

We were all running around, trying to take everyone’s tennis balls and put them into our hoops.  Then, one of the guys from the trip said “It’s not a competition!” 

We all stopped and realized that what we needed to do was stack the Hula hoops in the middle and place the balls into the center of the hoops. 

From then on, we never made anything a competition again, realizing we should work together.

Image from https://easternseastar21.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/handshake-1.png

From this little adventure, I learned about teamwork and that not everything is about competing.  Something I wouldn’t have learned on my own.