JV baseball

After playing freshman baseball in my freshman year and JV baseball in my sophomore year and being the starting catcher in every single one of those games, I came into my junior year tryouts thinking that if I worked my butt off during tryouts I'd have a decent shot at making the varsity squad. I was really surprised when i walked into the coach's office when it was time for cuts and was told that I hadn't made the team. He offered to let me stay on JV and play. I quickly took up the offer so that I could still play and make varsity in my senior year. I assumed that since I had been the starting catcher for the past two years and being the only junior on the JV team that year that I would remain as the starting catcher. This however was not the case. In fact I was sitting behind a freshman catcher. I would talk about how I thought I was better than him, but the fact was that he was a freshman and I was a junior and besides my superior throw to second he was just about as good as i was. This experience taught me to be patient and persistent and be open minded. Instead of criticizing the coach and the player in front of me, I worked at trying to earn some more playing time and I moved around to different positions in order to do so. In the meantime i became better at those positions and much more flexible which actually helped me a lot more as a baseball player.

P90x

Playing high school sports is not easy and when you go to such a hard school that gives you little time to sleep, you're naturally going to prioritize sleep over things like eating healthy and exercising. Over my first two years at my IB school I started to gain a lot of weight. Mostly because I grew from being about 5 foot 6 to being about 6' 2" but also because I stopped playing hockey after freshman year because it was taking up too much time. This lost me all of my cardio workout because baseball and golf don't really require you to keep your heart rate up. I decided this year that if I was going to be able to make the varsity baseball squad I'd have to get back into shape. My friend got my a copy of p90x which is a really intense workout program and really hard to stick with. Its 90 days and you're ripped. I have yet to be able to go more than 5 days in a row but the important thing is not that I'm following the program perfectly but rather that I am working out at least 2-3 days per week. I've not gotten ripped but I'm definitely stronger and some of the fat that i gained (which wasn't much) has been turned into muscle.

Washing Trays

At our school we have a class called product team where you work as a part of a team to try and accomplish some sort of task. In my junior year I was placed in a product team class where it is more open ended and you are able to sort of chose what you want to do to a certain extent. My 3 buddies and I decided that it would be good to take this class time to our advantage and do something that serviced the school. Our school cafeteria has recently switched over to plastic trays at lunch rather than the typical styrafoam ones. We decided that we would help out by washing all of the trays after lunch so that they could be used again the next day. Product team is a class where people usually work on homework or just goof around. I'm glad that we didn't waste our time but instead helped out our school by doing work but also helped out the environment by highly reducing the amount of trays that would be thrown into landfills ever day. Especially because styrafoam doesn't decompose.

Stop motion intro

I have always loved film and been really interested in how it works and making my own short films and movies. I joined YouTube in my 8th grade year which was 2007. I was on YouTube during the age when it was truly a community and before it had tons of adverts and companies trying to suck profits from the users. I was on there purely for fun and to experiment making different kinds of videos. Once I got into high-school I started to take the idea of film a little bit more seriously and started treating as such. I decided that I wanted to make a professional film project. What better way to start off with than with a stop motion animation project. I decided that I wanted to do an 8-bit style video game theme which would include classic video games such as pong, tetris, snake, mario and others. I decided that a good medium to use would be starburst candies because they were square like pixels and could easily be fit to a grid and they came in 4 colors which was simple enough and gave that 8bit feel to it.

Stagecrafters #2

When I arrived at the theater on my first day I was really nervous because I had never done this before and I expected to be paired up with kids that had a lot of expertise and would judge me if I screwed up right away. It turned out that I was the only one who had volunteered for the actual set building. There were people who would come in to paint and decorate but it was going to be just me and the set designer in terms of building the framework. It turns out that set building just required cutting and putting together 2 by 4s which I have done before along with much more complex carpentry projects with both my dad and grandpa. I was able to jump right on board and work very quickly and complete many sections of sets. It was a great feeling to know that I could take some skills I already had and apply them in a completely different area.

Stagecrafters - Day one

So after I had caught the theater bug from performing and being a part of productions at my school, I began to realize that there were opportunities to help out in my community using my knowledge from theater as well as my outgoing personality and work ethic when it comes to getting a job done. There is a youth theater program in my hometown that performs out of a pretty big theater that seats a couple hundred patrons. They needed someone to build sets for their summer show of "The Little Mermaid". I volunteered for the job even though I had no experience what so ever with building sets.

Parkour Pro

Going into high school I saw all these really cool ninja guys in commercials. They ran around and jumped off stuff and did flips off of walls and cars and anything that just happened to be in that urban setting. When I saw a commercial for honda cars where they had a bunch of really awesome looking cool kids jumping around and looking really sweet, I decided that I wanted to be a professional parkour player when I grew up. I really tried my hardest and made sure to use all of the IB learner profile traits, especially caring because when your doing some really sweet jumps and looking really cool, you dont want to make your friends really jealous. Thats why I consider myself a really nice open minded guy who takes a lot of risks. As you can see, I do some pretty insane stunts that require a lot of intelligents. If it wasnt for CAS, I would never have gotten to look this sweet.


Here's me looking REALLY sweet. Look at that air!