Day 9: Sunday, July 19
Reported by: Kate Harbour, Alexandria City High School and Matt Savage, Marshall High School
We just completed the 8th Day of the High School Leaders Program at UVA! Today we completed a ropes course focusing on team building, exercise, and fun! The day started out by doing a game akin to tag, but instead of running and tagging different people you had to keep your hands on your knees and could only tag other people's knees. These games focused on building confidence and took us out of our comfort zone. Next we split into groups and did a charades-like game except you had to act out a machine! We also did a trust building exercise that had us hold hands and walk across a balance beam without failing relying on the force of pushing each, once this exercise was over the rain started. Even though it started raining halfway through the course, we were only set back by about fifteen minutes as we cramped in a shed to wait out the rain, then we adapted and took a long, scenic walk to a recreation center on campus, where we played basketball, volleyball, and soccer in an air conditioned gymnasium. We all got our exercise in, and I personally walked over 15 thousand steps. From the gym, we took another walk to the “O-Hill” dining hall, from which we ate dinner where they served pasta, corn dogs, pizza, and as always, grilled cheese. Walking back to the dorms, we were again hit by rain, but we survived and made it home without any casualties. After dinner, we walked back to Gooch to dive into working on our policy projects that are due on Friday.
