I owe a lot to Kevin Federline. If it wasn't for him, my Academic Competition team would not have won our very first game last spring.
It may be a little unfair to give "KFed" all the credit, however. Although the name of Britney Spears' ex was the answer to the last question of the game, the question that gave my team the narrow ten point lead we needed to beat Concord High, I think my teammates and I deserve a little acknowledgment.
I have been president of my school's academic competition team since sophomore year. We had no wins or trophies to speak of before the aforementioned match. The only thing we had to show for our dedication to the team was a plethora of random facts. By mid-sophomore year I began to notice that our moderator's idea of practicing for our competitions, which essentially consisted of a game of "Trivial Pursuit" every meeting, was not providing us with sufficient preparation for our matches and competitions. What good would knowing that Leo Tolstoy took six years to write "War & Peace" or that Wrigley's gum was the fist product to have a bar code serve if we weren't being taught how to be effective learners?
I began devising a plan that would whip my teammates and me into shape and, by the end of sophomore year, our meetings had undergone a dramatic transformation. Instead of our playing our usual game of Trivial Pursuit, we now spend our meetings studying a different topic each week from binders I created and divided into sections such as history, math, geography, and literature. At our weekly meetings, I assign my team-mates "homework" from their binders and, rather, than feeling like a difficult teacher, I feel pride in the fact that our team actually has a curriculum now by which we can be challenged.
As a member of Academic Competition team, I saw that change was necessary and, as president, I took the initiative to make this change a reality along with the cooperation of my teammates. The fact that I contributed to my team's by revamping our strategies and preparation techniques outweighs the fact that we secured a win by correctly answering the KFed question. My experiences as president of Academic Competition show that I am a driven individual who has the ability to follow through with a plan.