NFHS '08

The MIAA chose twelve student athletes from Massachusetts to represent Massachusetts at the NFHS Student Leadership Conference in Indianapolis. We felt it to be an honor and a privilege to even be considered, let alone chosen as one of twelve to serve on the Student Advisory Committee. We all met at the MIAA Office in Franklin at 8:45 on the morning of July 17th. From there, we got on the bus and headed of to Green Airport in Providence. We caught our first flight without losing anybody or any luggage and that was a major bonus. We had a little bit of a lay over in Chicago and we played card games and walked around the airport. By some stroke of luck, we made it to Indianapolis on time and with everyone and our entire luggage.
From there we got checked into the hotel and checked in with the NFHS people. All the Student Advisory Committee members crowded in the “freebie” room where we got t-shirts, shampoo, conditioner, a red polo, a bag, a notebook and lots of other things. Then we were introduced to Happy Bill, the conference photographer, and we were CLEARLY his favorite group. After getting settled in our rooms, we had the chance to explore the t-mobile lounge. T-mobile donated cell phones for everyone to use to call almost anywhere in the world. We all hung out in this one room with games, a big screen TV and movies, laptops with wireless internet, coaches, and popcorn.
That night, we had our first State Meeting where Massachusetts met Nebraska. We were broken up into groups by state and our leaders had us draw our state and everything that we feel is important or what people know our state for. Since we had double the amount of participants, our group split in half, boys vs. girls. The girls spent every second on the poster, but the boys finished early and made a very impressive tower of markers. From there, we were grouped off with a mix of people from Mass and from Nebraska to talk about issues in our schools to see how they compared to each other. After that, it was off to bed.
Day two required us all to wear our matching red polo’s we were given in the day before. We all met for breakfast at around 7:30 and then dove right into our ice breaker activities and workshops. It was a very long day, a good day, but long. As a treat for all of us, the NFHS staff planned a surprise outing for the night; they took us to the Children’s Museum, which is one of the largest museum for children in the world. It had six floors with a variety of wings to keep most people interested. There was a tolerance wing where there was information about Anne Frank and other prominent children figures in history. There was a comic book section where you could dress up as your favorite super hero. There was also a history of children’s amusements sections with a carrousel that we all rode several times (including our chaperones). After about an hour we were ready to go, but we were there for around three hours, making our own fun. We got back around ten and we were all beat.
Day three started out with an ice breaker session, but it was our community service day. They loaded us on a couple busses and brought us to a local park. Since there was such a large amount of us, we were split into two groups with two different locations. While it was a good experience for us to give back to a community, we all felt that our time would have been better spent cleaning a dirty park. Our park was actually pretty clean and we spent a lot more time sitting around trying to find something to do then actually doing something. Just when we thought we were done, one of the men in charge had us pick up and walk down the street to clean up a golf course for around an hour. What made the whole experience even more fun was when it started to rain!
We were told to get back to the hotel, shower and clean up, and dress nice because our chaperones were taking us out to dinner! We went to a restaurant called Boca de Peppo, an Italian place just around the block. We had a hilarious waiter named Adrian who sang Grease songs with us. We all told him that it was Mike’s birthday and made everyone sing happy birthday to him. We all had so much fun; it was most of our favorite parts of the trip. After that, we went back to the hotel and got ready for the dance! That was a lot of fun too. We were all sad to go back to our own rooms because it was our last night.
The next morning there was a bit of schedule confusion and the closing ceremony was pushed back an hour but no one knew about it until we got up there, all dressed and ready to go. There was a magician who was hilarious and very very good but sadly we had to leave partway through to catch our plane! Our first flight went smoothly, our lay over was fine, but we had some trouble trying to get home to providence. We are sitting on our flight waiting to taxi out to the runway when the captain makes the announcement that there have been some security breaches in Providence and there are no flights going in or out. He also said that he didn’t know how long it would take for them to get that cleared up, so we should just sit tight (as if we could do anything else). So we took pictures and slept and listened to music. In about an hour we had our clearance to depart and we made it home safely.