ALL BANQUET

ALL stands for Academics, Leadership, and Life Skills. It is a competition between the athletic teams at MSU in regards to our community service hours, academic and athletic achievements.

Anyone in athletics knows how competitive people in our department are, so to have a healthy competition like this benefiting our community and making the student's degree the number one priority is pretty cool. Our Athletic Department does an amazing job of hosting this banquet with our great MC, Tyler Wiltgen, and food by Outback Steakhouse.

When the awards started to be announced, however, I was quickly reminded of why I am so proud of who they are as individuals.

Our student athletes do community service because it feels good to help others. Take Lyndi Seidensticker, the 2011 ALL Challenge Individual Community Service Award winner. She is a Big Sister in the community and gets to play with a kid in our community every week. Hanging out with her new brother is what she looks forward to. She gets a break from her studies, her training, and sees how much he enjoys spending time with her.

I could list every student athlete on our team who has given back to our community in many ways as they gave nearly 300+ hours this year. Our team won the 2011 ALL Challenge Community Service Award.

Academically our team has prided themselves in this category. We had two students on our team Sarah Balian and Rachel Semansky awarded the District Seven First Team and Honorable Mention this year, and Lyndi Seidensticker was one of 40 All Excellence Award Winners on campus. As a team we won the 2011 ALL Challenge Academic Performance this year.

We also love to win athletically, and our ten game winning streak this year won the team the 2011 ALL Challenge Women's Team Performance. I think at this time the crowd was starting to get annoyed with our team's success. That felt pretty good as a coach.

I will wrap it up with the overall most prestigious award of them all which totals all three categories, the 2011 AL BEYE Memorial ALL Challenge Trophy. I will display it in my office with pride until next season in hopes of continuing to keep the dust off.

Ladies, I am so proud of who you are, and I want to keep the trophy, so let's go get it again next year. This may be my first "bragging" blog, but it's well worth it for what you do for others.

Coach Bin