Lydia Herring

I volunteered to help mentor and teach a middle school student get better at her soccer skills. I gave my time once a week to work with her and another coach to focus more with one on one time and skills. Throughout the past couple of months I have been able to see her grow as an athlete, soccer player and person through her skills and her new confidence and love for the game. I used my past experiences from playing soccer to help her work on her ball skills, working on the strength in both of her feet, and her overall spatial, field awareness. This experience also allowed me to grow as a mentor and a teacher and use my passions and talents to help others. Overall, this was an extremely rewarding experience.

This was a new experience for me as well as the memphis community. R4R participated in a race in Memphis Downtown, and it was its first ever event. I got to be apart of it and set up before the race and was there to cheer on the runners/walkers as they raced to make a difference. It was such a great experience to be able to cheer people on and see how excited they were as they ran past me and the group that was with me.

My teammate and I were able to go to the theatre and communications building at the university of memphis to help the head of graduate directing and her cast with their upcoming play in February. The play is about a high school soccer team and not many of the actresses have had much experience on a women soccer team. My teammate and I were able to show them some of the exercises we do in our warm-ups as well as show them different drills we do in practice. We also shared more of the mental aspect of being on a team and how that affect the relationships on the team. It was a really nice experience.

I tutored an 8th grade student that attends Saint Mary's. She was struggling in her Spanish class, and wanted to prepare early for her final Spanish exam and Spanish oral. I worked with her two hours each week for the past three weeks. We worked on her verb conjugations in the preterite and the subjunctive, so she could more effectively have conversations in the past. Throughout our sessions I ended each week by having a 15-20 minute conversation with her in Spanish just so she could get a better understanding of what her final oral will look like and can practice answering different questions on the fly. This was a really great exercise for her because I didn't stop the conversation whenever she made a mistake to correct her, instead I let her conversation flow so she could feel more comfortable conversations for longer periods of time. Through this experience, I was able to give back to something that I am extremely passionate about and use my experience with my Spanish minor to something I could see as a future career. This experience was extremely rewarding and it was exciting to see the things I have learned in college really come into play.

The St. Jude Marathon was this past weekend, and I helped volunteer to provide water and other hydrating things for the runners in the marathon. I supported the runners and cheered them on as they ran by because what they are doing is incredibly difficult but it supports a great cause. I really had a great time because other than hanging out water, I was able to read the runners names on their sheets as they passed by and was able to encourage them each by name so that they could feel supported and encouraged.

I went with a couple of Memphis Women's soccer friends to the Target House to wrap Christmas presents. We ended up unloading boxes of gifts, sorting them to different groups and moving them out of storage so more boxes could come. Though it was not what I was expecting, I had a great time learning more about the Target House and the things they do for the kids at St. Jude.

The Memphis Women's Soccer team and I supported our friends Tyler and Alyssa and St. Jude at the Zumbathon put on at St. Annes Church. We had a great time dancing and working out for a good cause and it was extremely exciting to see everyone go all in and really have a good time.

In this impact, a classmate reached out to me in my geology class to help her with some material as this is her first year in the states and English is not her first language. I helped explain to her the main concepts of a chapter and helped her define them in our own words, so she could better grasp these ideas and put them into her project/powerpoint that she would have to present in front of the class. One of the main things I helped her with was the pronunciation of the scientific terms she would be talking about during her presentation, but also explained them so that she understood what she was talking about so she could then take what I helped her with and then help/teach it to the rest of the class. In doing this, I learned how to assist someone that is not well versed in the English language and struggles to understand concepts in a language that is not their first.