My father (a very wise man) once told me, “You will only get out of life what you put into it.” I would like to think that I have learned an awful lot from my father throughout my years, but undoubtedly this is the most pertinent lesson he preached. It is by analyzing my life through this lens that I became aware of the issue of virtually no community involvement/service performed by the varsity tennis team – a team I am proud to captain. Therefore I am on a journey to change and upend this limited commitment to the community that supports us so dearly. In order to lay the foundations of community involvement with my team and demonstrate the pleasure it can bring for both you and the people you are serving, I am organizing a volunteer tennis clinic that I will run, with help from my teammates, at the local children’s orphanage.
What It Will Take
There are numerous obstacles and challenges that lie ahead in order to complete this task and most importantly, ensure that this philosophy of helping those in need around you is retained by my team and that they will continue to participate more frequently in programs such as this. A leader of a volunteering program requires expertise in characteristics that I believe I possess in abundance. For example; a couple of the most critical characteristics of a successful volunteer leader are motivation and commitment to the cause. The reason these are crucial is because people are often reluctant to commit to something that they don’t see any immediate or personal gains from, therefore a leader of this type of program must be able to motivate the people around them in order to accomplish a goal that may at first seem obscure to some. Secondly, the leader must have a lot of commitment to wanting to help the selected people, a leadership style known as ‘Servant Leadership’. In my case, I was introduced to the director of the orphanage and his passion and love for these children inspired and instilled in me a desire to want to help these children, who are of a similar age to me, yet have unfortunately had a less privileged upbringing. One of the leadership skills I hope to develop and improve throughout this experience is my ability to empower my colleagues. Although I feel completely confident in my tennis ability and teaching the fundamental skills of the game, it is the aspect of ensuring my teammates know how to implement the experience and memory I want these children to leave with, that I want to practice. I want to help enable my teammates to feel a sense of confidence and self-belief that will hopefully inspire them to do similar service missions in the future.
Recruitment Phase
Luckily for my endeavor I already have a set number of teammates (9) I can turn to and rely on for their commitment to this cause; therefore the recruitment cycle for this particular experience is relatively limited. However, there are some challenges in terms of getting the team to ‘buy into’ the concept of giving up an afternoon of their free time to play tennis with under-privileged children. The majority of my teammates were raised in good neighborhoods with well-rounded families who provided for them almost everything they could ever want or need. It is for this reason that these guys haven’t been exposed to the hardships some of their peers live through on a day to day basis. Therefore I think it may be challenging to overcome their natural instinct to not want to participate in this event as they don’t fully understand the benefit just a simple afternoon of their time can have on the happiness of some of these troubled teenagers. In order to get around this fact I will try and explain the pleasure they can bring by merely displaying their talents and being selfless.
Another challenge I have envisioned when thinking through this experience is ensuring that my team stays engaged and focused on delivering a professional clinic when undoubtedly there will be some children at the clinic who will try to cause trouble and basically just act like kids. In order to ensure this doesn’t become an issue I have pre-arranged that there be extra mentors for the kids at the clinic, provided by the orphanage, whose job it will be to ensure the children are being well behaved and not causing any problems.
Overall, I think once my team gets to the courts and starts the clinic they will thrive on the experience and will find ways to overcome any challenge thrown their way. It is therefore down to me to lead my team up until the time of our clinic and motivate them to luck forward to the opportunity I am presenting them with.
Measurements of Success
Measuring the success of a volunteering project is less straight forward than that of a business venture where objective data can be collected regarding profit and loss etc. Many volunteering efforts are judged based on their longevity and ability to keep inspiring both volunteers and those in need to come back for more. Therefore, my success measurements will be based on a two part feedback system, both positive and negative, from the children that attend the clinic, their instructors that will be present and finally my teammates. I hope to spend time one or days after the event sitting down, or on the phone with the orphanage’s volunteer leaders in order to see where we could have performed better or did a good job and hopefully get a count of children who would want to do more work with us. I will use this feedback as part one to gauge our success from the children’s point of view.
Part two of my feedback system will revolve around my team and coaches. I plan on organizing a meeting to discuss the volunteering experience and judge the feedback this way. I want to get exact figures in terms of the number of guys who want to participate in this kind of program again, and hopefully more frequently, as well as suggestions of other places we could perform a clinic. I think by utilizing a combination approach to measuring success from both the children’s perspective and our own perspective, I will be able to rate my success as a leader as well as our overall volunteering effort. To clarify, my specific measurable goals are for 7 out of my 9 teammates to openly commit to doing another program such as this and secondly for the instructors that attend to rate our performance on average of an 8 out of 10.
Project Sustainability
As explained above, a volunteering effort is almost exclusively based on the sustainability of the project, therefore it is imperative that I ensure our volunteers (my teammates) are committed to helping the local community and will continue volunteering once I have graduated. This is not the easiest of tasks, given their already high time commitment to both academics and tennis, yet I truly believe spending a couple of hours every other week or so is not too much to ask of these athletes and will help fully round them as individuals once they are ready to enter society post-graduation. I want to make this point very clear to my team and will therefore sit them down both before and after the event to discuss how we can keep this sort of local community involvement program going. I think the most critical time for this project will be directly after our service mission, as this is the time that the players will really still be feeling the high that volunteering provides and will be most receptive to continuing in this vain. Therefore I plan to propose a loose contract agreement with my teammates for an undecided amount of community service or volunteering to be completed each semester. Having negotiated with coaches and staff over the legality of this kind of arrangement I have been able to succeed in this proposition. Therefore, as has been tradition on the tennis team for years, captaincy of the team is passed down during our senior banquet. It is here that I will pass on the responsibilities of performing this community service and place it upon the new captain’s shoulders to make himself and his teammates accountable for their involvement in similar programs. I am positive that this will provide an added sense of prestige to the position of captain and they will utilize the momentum we have already created. Finally, next year’s captain happens to be an extremely active member of the community already, which again fills me with confidence that he will be able to build on what we have started this year.
Where am I Today?
Currently I’m sitting in the library surrounded by countless other students bashing away at their laptops, furiously trying to get their work done so they can get a few precious hours sleep (did I mention it’s 3am?!) On a more serious note my leadership journey is progressing smoothly, I have been in contact with both the executive director as well as the volunteering director at the orphanage and we are currently in talks over what afternoon works best for both my team and the children. With our ACC tennis season about to kick-off it is becoming more challenging finding a date that works for both of us, yet I think we will have this arranged within the next week. I know the staff at the orphanage is delighted we are offering our time and that I have taken the initiative for this to happen and I am certainly thrilled to have the opportunity to lead such a rewarding experience.
So, with all that being said, why not end as we began, with another quote from my father; “let’s get this show on the road!”
