[Adrienne E.]

I haven’t posted in a long time, but this is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot this year. Mostly because we, as in 148, decided (for various reasons) that we were going to submit a Chairman’s Award this year for the first time in 3 years, and actually put effort into the submission for the first time in 8 or 9 years. One of the main reasons for this is because the team can feel the change we are making in the community and we thought “Why aren’t we submitting? We really are changing culture here.” We found that the hardest part was putting that feeling into words on paper, or pictures in a video, or getting those feelings across in a presentation. Now I’m certain that these struggles are not unique to us, just ones that we haven’t had before since we haven’t really been putting effort into a submission. But these struggles are what really made the experience worthwhile to us.
All of a sudden we started to put together quantitative data of things we felt like were important aspects of the team. As soon as we started listing these facts and statistics a lot of us had a bit of an epiphany. We knew we were doing things to inspire students, and create excitement in a small town about something other then football, but we really didn’t realize how big the impact was. For us submitting, and pretty much knowing we weren’t going to win, was OK because it made our team bond stronger and made us all proud to be Wranglers even more then we were before.
Selfishly my favorite part of our Chairman’s effort this year was, to help us decide who should present at competition we made each student on the team present their favorite team memory or just say what the team meant to them. I was crying most of meeting, because hearing those stories reminded me of why I’m here, and why I believe in this program so much.
So that is my limited experience with why I think Chairman’s submissions are a great part of the program. Even if we have no chance of winning ever, I now know how valuable the experience can be.