Hoffman

** A Pre-Game Warm-up **
 * Winter/Spring 2012 Mr. Dunne **

What do sports mean to you as an athlete and as a fan? Sports play a huge part in how society functions. The relationships people share socially and emotionally can really stem from the competitive nature in athletics. As a competitive athlete, sports take up the majority of my free time and has become a way of expression for me. I've found that I've become the type of person I am today from sports regarding my work ethic and my relationships with my peers.

What has been your experience with youth sports? Describe your best and worst experiences. My parents found it necessary to sign me for pretty much every sport that the town of Hingham offered so my childhood was graced with a plethora of experiences when it came to my youth sports career. I've been able to cover ballet, baseball, softball, lacrosse, basketball, field hockey, soccer, and figure skating over my life thus far so I've garnered plenty of experience and learned plenty of new things with the range of sports that I've participated in. As for specific experiences, I would say I was at my best when I hit the ball straight down the third base line for a triple in t-ball. After this particular experience I really started to build confidence and I found that my competitiveness in all my sports began to grow because I began to understand what I was capable of. I started to become serious about basketball and lacrosse in particular when I entered middle school and joined club teams for both. While I stopped AAU Basketball freshman year, I stuck with club lacrosse and found that the majority of my development and growth as an athlete stemmed from my lacrosse experiences. It's been such a rewarding feeling to see such a vast amount of hard work and dedication pay off to the point where I'll have the opportunity to continue my lacrosse career in college.

Do athletes make good role models? Identify one or two professional athletes to make your case. While there are plenty of instances where athletes are labeled as poor role models, mostly due to the media, throughout my childhood I considered professional athletes as people I looked up to. As I've become older, I still admire athletes because I understand what they go through when it comes to training and demanding schedules, but I've also come to understand their faults much more than when I was younger. I love Tim Tebow and admire him for the fact that he can still stick to his beliefs through his professional football career. Athletes including Lance Armstrong and Bethany Hamilton have persevered through trauma and have really shown society that athletes can be dependable role models through thick and thin.

What sports/teams do you pay attention to the most? How much time do sports occupy in your life? How do you spend that time (attending, watching, reading, talking, participating)? Being raised in such a sports-driven city like Boston has definitely shaped the role that sports play in my life. My dad was the Patriots' PR Director for nine years, so the Patriots is the front runner in my household. I spend most of my time playing or watching some form of a sport and find myself talking about sports everyday. A lot of my time is also dedicated to training for sports because its so crucial to be at the top of your game now a days as sports become more and more competitive.

What sports-related issues would you be disappointed //not// to cover in this class? Why? I'd like to cover more of the money-related issues and the impact money has on sports. I think its hard for many people to wrap their minds around the fact that we have athletes making millions and millions of dollars every year by just simply playing a sport. The fact that money becomes such a big issue even at the college level with scholarships, etc. is something I'd like to dig into. It would be hard to ignore the financial side of sports because it has and will continue to become such a prominent issue in our society.