ACADEMIC ELITE TEAM OF MMSST – PART 3

MEET OUR STUDENT/ATHLETES OFF OF THE SNOW!!

By Lora Wehsener

This is the final article in our “Meet our Student/Athletes Off of the Snow!” series.

What a great essay journey it has been.

Our stellar student/athletes have reflected, written and shared. Their academic ski team essays have been a combination of inspiring recaps, candid reflections and insight into their magnificent thoughts and values. What a privilege it is for MMCF to have the opportunity to see into the minds of the impressive student/athletes from MMSST! Excelling both in the classroom and on the snow is not to be taken lightly. These youth are amazing!

We hope you have enjoyed this essay series. Perhaps we have all encountered some different perspectives and possibly learned a thing or two. Thank you to all of the student/athletes who have generously let us publish their essays.

To be a member of the MMCF Academic Elite Team requires one to maintain a 3.5 GPA while participating on the Mammoth Mountain Ski and Snowboard Team. The student/athletes are asked to write an essay when submitting their application. Because of the insightful, engaging and inspiring essays that have been submitted, with permission of the essay author, we are excited to share them with you, our MMCF family.

ESSAY PROMPTS

Elementary School Students

1. I will never forget the day…

2. Pretend you can trade places with someone real or imaginary, from the past or present. Describe who that person is and why you would like to trade places. Write about what you would do as that person for the day and how you would feel about it.

Middle School Students

1. Choose an event in your life, and write about it from the perspective of someone else who was there.

2. What would you like to tell adults in the future about being a young person during this time period?

High School Students

1. What's the worst thing about the internet?

2. Should everyone go to college?

OWEN ZHANG - 7th GRADE

A Young Man of Mammoth Spirit

In today's world, there is incredible diversity in hobbies, personalities, passions, and cultures. For me, I chose to be an athlete with a strong passion for snowboarding and a team player in hockey.

As a young person in this era, it is essential to have a goal or a passion to pursue. Many people look up to role models. I admire snowboard legends Shaun White and Zeb Powell. Achieving goals requires hard work and dedication. For me, training and practicing with the Mammoth Snowboard Team are steps toward reaching my ambitions. It's also important to turn setbacks into opportunities. While practicing a trick called a "backside 720," I kept falling. After reviewing the video, I realized I wasn't spinning enough for a good landing. I took this lesson to heart and improved my technique.

Like any journey, there are ups and downs. For example, when my hockey team and I competed in the State Championships, we lost in the finals. Despite a perfect regular season where we didn't lose even once, we didn't win when it mattered most. I believe our overconfidence played a role. Although losing was disappointing, it served as a valuable learning experience, helping our team grow and teaching us the importance of humility.

Accidents are another part of the journey. Two days before the end of the 2024-2025 season, I fell onto my shoulder while snowboarding on an easy rail — something I had done many times before — and I ended up breaking my collarbone. This taught me to be cautious on the mountain and always stay aware of my surroundings.

Ultimately, I believe it's vital to value qualities like being coachable, humble, and open-minded. Aim high, work hard to achieve your goals, but most importantly, enjoy your life and cherish your friendships. Stay motivated and keep pushing forward!

PEARL JOHNSON - 10th GRADE

The worst thing about the internet is not actually what lurks inside of it, but simply the amount of time people have grown to spend searching it. Humans have started to spend hours and days online when they could be going outside, meeting new people, and truly living life. While the internet and new technology are now vital in the current world and have many benefits, there are many downsides to the seemingly endless expanse of knowledge and entertainment available to view online. Although the internet is a somewhat new invention, it has quickly exploded into something humans use every day for almost every part of their lives.

From schoolwork to learning new skills, from mindless games to coding programs, the internet has completely rewired the way that people think, live, and spend free time. Even in the most beautiful places in the world, hours upon hours are spent at every person's desk, couch, or bed scrolling on social media or trying to beat a level on some random game that they don't even enjoy that much. People have started to spend too much time on screens, missing out on what else life has to offer.

There are so many human beings that are outdoors, on a beach or during a break on a hike, that immediately pull out their phones at any given chance to keep a streak on a mobile app or check Instagram and TikTok. The internet provides lots of ways to learn and grow, but that does not mean that the ability to go outside, to talk to real people, and to have real conversations should be discarded.

Without going through the challenges of real life and finding oneself, whether that be in a hobby, in experiencing stunning wilderness places, or anything aside from being online, human kind may lose what it actually means to be alive. On this unreal Earth that we call home, becoming trapped in the lures of the internet throughout life will prove to be a much scarier future than going outside and not reaching the next level on that addicting game.

JAKE SILVERA - 7th GRADE

In the future, the world will be a different place and people will likely forget what childhood is like now. If I were to tell people from the future anything about what it's like to be a kid in the present-day, I would tell them about what it was like to grow up with the COVID-19 pandemic and about how kids knew more about technology than their parents.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most impactful things to happen in my lifetime. For me, it started at the end of my first grade year and my life was completely different for the next year. For many kids, it was different for two or more years. During that time, most of us had to do school online. We couldn't see our friends or family in person and, when we did, we were required to wear masks and do social distancing. Many kids even experienced tragedy if a friend or relative became sick. For many of us, this was a big part of our childhoods lost, when we could be meeting new friends, spending quality time with loved ones, and doing more in school than just online assignments on learning websites.

The second thing I would tell adults in the future about children right now is about how much more we know about the internet and digital technology than our parents. In the future, almost everyone will be used to the internet because they will have lived their whole lives with it. My children will learn about the internet and technology from parents who had experience with it their whole lives. Currently, our parents, teachers, and other adults only had access to the internet later in their lives because the development of it was so recent. As a result, my peers and I know more about technology and often are asked to help our parents, teachers, and other adults to understand how to use it.

In conclusion, the world will develop a lot in the future, and people might not remember what childhood was like for kids now. Two things that I would share about my childhood are my experiences of living during a global pandemic and with internet technology. Describing those two things will give people in the future a good sense of what it was like to be a kid in the 2020s and why we turned out the way we did!

ELISE CHOU - 11th GRADE

The worst thing about the internet is how easily misinformation spreads, and how many people believe it. The internet used to be a safe haven for people to get information reliably and easily, but it has turned into a rapidly growing, disastrous mess, where no one can trust a thing. Kids believe everything they see on TikTok and Instagram, and trust what their favorite influencers say without another doubt.

With algorithms that push misinformation for hopes of better views and likes, knowing what is true and what isn't is incredibly hard to tell nowadays. The recent rise of AI has further fostered misinformation with fake videos and pictures being created, along with misinformation and fake news given. Social media platforms designed for engagement often prioritize addictive fake information and content, over the real truth as it may seem more appealing to viewers.

With this rise of misinformation, people are losing the ability to think for themselves, only relying on social media for their information. Younger and younger kids depend on social media as a way to get information or learning, which can be detrimental to learning or furthering education.

While the internet offers incredible opportunities and promotes interconnectivity across the world, the usefulness of the internet is undermined by the misinformation and fake news that is shared on social media. The internet can be a wonderful thing when used for the right reasons, but in recent times it's turned into a dismal wasteland of misinformation and fake news.