Josie Wolf

College of Education

14 February 2020

Community Service

Within the past year, I had the opportunity to serve my community by helping children learn the

game of basketball and baseball. I played both sports growing up; I loved staying active and hanging out

with my friends. I think playing sports has value beyond physical health. Playing sports gives children a

sense of mental, social, and physical awareness making them well-rounded individuals. I love the

opportunity to instill the same passion I had in younger individuals that may look up to me.

When I helped coach youth basketball this last year, there were two groups of kids including

children in 1st and 2nd grade and a group of children in 3rd and 4th grade. It was really cool seeing so many

kids, essentially starting out from scratch having no previous experience, learning to play basketball.

Being their role model gave me such a great sense of pride, but I know it also had a great effect on the

individuals playing as well. At the end of the season, two young girls made me a bracelet and gave it me

as a thank you gift for helping them out.

In my position, I helped kids not only grow a better understanding for basketball, but for

themselves as young kids. Some of the players have older siblings that play sports, which encourages

these young kids to play to be like them. Unfortunately, due to age gaps or other reasons, I found that

older siblings tend to lack patience to work with their younger siblings on their skills. Now that they at

least have the basic level knowledge and skills, I think their older siblings will be more apt to teach them

new things or help them further improve. It was really fun opening up the basketball program to so

many young kids and watching them grow throughout the process.
 I was able to teach children the fundamentals of basketball and how those fundamentals make

up the bigger picture of the whole game. We did lots of drills to work on shooting, dribbling, and

passing. We would split the groups up by boys and girls and one group would work on passing and

shooting and the other would work on dribbling. We came up with many different ideas and ways to

improve them in these areas, so they wouldn’t get bored by doing the same activities every day. When

the kids weren’t listening or doing something, they shouldn’t be doing we would reinforce listening by

having them do pushups.

I also helped kids learn the game of baseball last spring/summer. This was a little different

experience for me, as the players weren’t joining for their first year. Most of these kids started playing t-

ball when they were 5 and have been playing together for about 5 years. I helped coach kids 10 and

under learn the fundamentals, importance of teamwork, and good attitudes when playing baseball. For

fundamentals we would practice fielding grounding balls, catching pop flies, pitching, and hitting. All of

these are just as important as the next when playing baseball. No matter if you’re pitching, or out in the

outfield, every person out on the field or on the team is important as this sport requires a lot of

teamwork. With teamwork, comes communication and knowledge of the game. There has to be

continual communication of where there are opponents on base, if it’s a good hitter coming up and

fielders need to back up, or where you’re going to want to throw the ball. Knowledge is important

because if you only have someone on second base, you’re not going to want to throw it to third because

they don’t have to run as there is no “force”. Just like any sport every person on the team needs to

demonstrate a good attitude. If one person has a poor attitude, it will affect the rest of the team poorly.

So, showing good attitude as a coach is very important too. I also wanted to demonstrate although it is

important to win, it is more important to have fun.

I know I had a positive impact on all these teams, but they also had such a positive impact on

me. I learned a great deal about problem solving, team work, patience, and just being approachable for
players to come ask for help if needed. I think we should all live like we are a role model to someone,

because even if we think no one is watching, chances are, someone is.