I love Arvada High

I’m a senior at Arvada High. I play soccer and run track. Currently, I’m the captain of the soccer team and I’m really happy about that. I love Arvada. I like doing great things and hanging out with my friends. I’m really friendly and the whole school knows me.

Playing soccer

I’ve been playing soccer since I was 6 years old. Arvada has had an amazing season. I’m playing midfielder for the team. My dream is to play soccer in college. I was born in Guatemala and since I came to the U.S. in 2010, I just wanted to play college soccer. Hopefully I can make it. As team captain I have a lot of responsibilities. One of them is texting my teammate if practice is cancelled, and what time the bus is leaving for games. The most important thing is to be a leader and reminder my team to keep working hard and to lift up spirits when the game isn’t going so well. I feel like that’s a great responsibility and I enjoy it. I like being a leader, showing people and teaching people.

Being an athletic leader

I’m part of the Athletic Leadership Team at Arvada High. Here at Arvada we don’t have a great reputation for sports and we’re trying to change that culture. The program is based on academics, athletics, community and culture. When we talk about academics, we have Bulldog classes where athletes can go and get their grades up. Athletics is about trying to be the best. Sometimes our social worker talks to the athletes about improving our game and never giving up. Because when you’re two goals down or something like that, you can give up easily. For community, we do a lot of things. The thing that I like is that every week we have something new that we do. Recently we went to Arvada K-8 and played soccer with the kids during lunch. If our athletic director goes and talks with them for 30 minutes, they might not remember, but if we go and show them that we appreciate them and work with them and just have fun with them, they will remember that. And culture … we just love everyone. I think the most important thing is to be humble.

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