Fixing the Freshman Experience

The beginning of this week was pretty frustrating. I worked everyday trying to come up with ideas. I made a whole list of possible projects, but none of them seemed right to me. Then during a run on Wednesday it hit me. The whole point of 
an innovations project is to make something better. Well something everyone has to go through is the terrible experiences of Freshman year. I thought back to the worst part of my Freshman year: being excluded on my cross country team. 
Being a freshman on a team is hard because you really don't know anyone outside of those people in your class. The older teammates try to be nice, but you are an outsider for at least the first few months.

The idea I have for my first project is a way to smoothly incorporate the incoming freshman class onto a sports team. I'm going to start with the girl's cross country team, because that's my team and I want to be able to see first hand if this works. The first thing I did was ask a couple girls two questions: "Was coming onto this team as a freshman hard?" And "Would you be willing to help a freshman next year with adjusting?" The answers I got were all yes. Next thing I did was ask the Highschool coach if he thought this project would help 
with team bonding and he adamantly agreed. My plan is to nip this problem in the butt; I want to stop the separation of next year's freshman class before it even starts. I'm going to start introducing the class of 2015 into our team this year 
while they're still eighth graders. 

So I got the email addresses for the girl's cross country coaches at both middle schools. My plan is to email these coaches seeing if I can either come to a practice and talk with the eighth graders that will run with us next year or to 
come to a duel meet and introduce the three teams together then. I would like to assign every eighth grader a high schooler who can come to some of the middle schooler's meets, text her, just anything that will make the middle schooler feel welcomed on to our team. The goal being that next year when the freshman 
class comes to practice, those girls will already know at least one person from another grade. Hopefully this project will make the incoming Freshman feel like part of the team and eliminate the feeling of separation that shouldn't have to come along as part of the freshman experience.