Heart of a Champion

When I choose to highlight a specific event, person, or accomplishment at our school, I know I risk missing other great stuff that is happening in our community. It is amazing what our students are doing and accomplishing each and every week. With that said, I do like to highlight stuff that I see or was a part of, especially when it makes an impression. This time I am highlighting our varsity girls’ basketball team, and yes, I know that it looks like preferential treatment since I am the coach, but I still feel I want to tell this story anyway.

This season, the girls and coaches talked a lot about not trying to “earn” a championship but instead about “being” champions — that the score of one game would not define us as champions but instead our play on the court and how we carried ourselves throughout the season as a team would show that we were already champions. At the ACSC tournament last week in Hong Kong, the Dalat girls were a championship team.

It was really sad and disappointing to not win the one game that would recognize them as champions, but in the midst of what happened last Saturday, our girls showed everybody at the tournament that they were already champions. I had six different people come up to me after the game to compliment our girls on how they played:

• An alumnus from the class of 2009, who was at the championship game on Saturday, came up to the team afterwards and told them that she has never been prouder to be a Dalat alumnus.
• Coaches from three different teams at the tournament came up to me at the banquet and awards ceremony to compliment the team. The words used often by each of them was “character,” “class,” and “sportsmanship.”
• A referee came up to me and told me that he loved how our girls played the game of basketball and enjoyed reffing their games.
• An administrator for ICS Hong Kong came up to me and said that he had never seen a team handle a championship loss with such class and dignity as well as our girls did on Saturday.

Keep in mind that these individuals did not have to do this, they were not making small talk, each one went out of his/her way to find me and tell me how impressed they were with our girls. Though we all wish we would have won the championship, in the midst of disappointment our girls showed that they each have the heart of a champion, and the score of one single game cannot and will not change that.

Have a great long weekend,

Mr. Karl Steinkamp
Head of School