According to basketball team manager David Kress ’19, “Simply being part of the team” is the best part of the job, and makes the late practices, Wednesday games, and book-keeping all worth it.
It’s currently David’s second season being a team manager for basketball teams. David started out freshman year helping both freshman teams and now he is the team manager for the JV basketball team. Next year he hopes to continue team managing for varsity.
David first wanted to be a team manager for two major reasons. “I wanted to be a part of the team [and] I wanted to make new friends” he explained. The second reason is especially important to David because he was able to meet, “a group of people who had some of the same interests as me.” However, not everything went as David expected, adding, “I didn’t really expect myself to get to know the players and develop some kind of relationship with them … to be honest I thought I was going to be a little rejected by them.” To David’s surprise, “most of the players and the coach treat me as if I am on the team.”
David summed up being a team manager saying, “Overall, I think the biggest thing about the experience is the relationships I developed with the players on the team. I knew very little people on the team and the people I knew I weren’t really friends with. Now I feel that I have developed very strong relationships with them and some of my best friends I have today I would have never met or knew if I didn’t decide to do this. I have created so many memorable relationships and memories that I would like to remember for the rest of my life.”