This Saturday I had the extreme pleasure of helping out with a Take the Field clinic. TtF is a great new program started by a few of my teammates to empower middle and high school girls through ultimate. Go now and like them on Facebook!
The program is split up into clinics on Friday evenings and Saturday afternoon. Each clinic session focuses on a different leadership skill and ultimate skill and is led by different women from the ultimate community in the Triangle area. Our session took place at the Emily K. Center in downtown Durham. They have a fantastic facility, and some really cool staff members who might also be my teammate 🙂
I co-led with Britta Jones, a PhD student at UNC and long-time ultimate player at both Florida and UNC. Here she is imparting some frisbee wisdom:
The topics we covered were written communication as the leadership skill and man defense for the ultimate skill. Naturally I was pumped about written communication because I got to cover social media!
We focused the written communication session on knowing your audience on any form of communication, whether that be social media, email, or phone and texting. For social media, our audience is everyone so I asked to the girls what they used social media for and then talked to them about who was eventually going to see these profiles. Because social media data and profiles stay with us basically forever, I gave them some ways to curate a social media profile that said something about who they are that would stand the test of time.
To get the girls thinking and participating, we broke up into small groups and came up with example Facebook posts and Tweets for one person in that group . Then we got back together and shared what we came up with; the girls had some great ideas! In the group I worked with, one of the girls was a leader in her school’s LGBT group and we talked about what kinds of updates she could post via Twitter and what kinds of video and photos she could post to show her involvement and passion for the group.
Brita covered email and phone communication, and even I was reminded of some e-etiquette points! We talked about BCC vs CC in an email and when it is appropriate to reply vs reply-all.
To sum everything up we did a little interactive storytelling activity. I told them the story of how my sister posted a speeding ticket on Facebook and at critical junctures in the story, I asked them how a certain situation should have been dealt with. They seemed to really enjoy it, since it was something with which they could all identify.
Finally we got to the fun part! After a quick lap around the gym we dove into walk-throughs and drills to teach the girls about man defense. Here are a couple pics of the girls getting their D on:
Thanks to the fantastic coordinators Janna, Meg, and LG, my fabulous co-leader Britta, and to all the girls who came out. I had a blast!
ColoradoRachel 