The Sportsmanship Conference was held at Los Banos High School’s gym on September 12. The conference brought some ASB students from each school in our league together to discuss how we can continue improving sportsmanship at our schools.

        The beginning of the conference started with the guest speaker Jesse Lebeau. He gave his life story of how he lived on this really small island in Alaska and had to go on a boat everyday to get to school. He was told because of these reasons and that he was short that he would never be able to be a basketball player.  Instead of letting this get to him, he decided to prove everyone wrong. He became a street ball player for nationally televised games on Fox playing against some of the best players in the world. 

        Lebeau has a saying that is pretty popular today. It’s “just do it.” He said that you shouldn’t focus on when people say you can’t do something. Even when you try something new and fail, nothing changes. People are always saying they want to go out and accomplish something, but they never put in any effort. He wants to change that and get people to take action.

        Once Lebeau was done speaking, Linda Cooper came out. She is a retired Activity Director at Ceres High School and will be part of the California Activity Director Hall of Fame.

        Cooper conducted a group activity.  She told all the students to get into groups according to the wristband color we received when we entered the event.  In these groups, all the students introduced themselves to each other and told one interesting fact about themselves.

        Afterwards, each group was given a big piece of paper that had written on it different words such as “float,” “homecoming,” “sports,” “cheer,” etc. With these words the whole group came up with ideas related to that word to make the school a better place for the people attending it as well as students from other schools coming to visit.  These concepts were shared as a whole.

        Mr. Barcellos, athletic director said, “The main goal of the sportsmanship conference is to bring all the schools together from our league and discuss good sportsmanship among the schools in regards to floats, banners, chants/cheers, etc. Just to make sure everyone is positive in these things.”

The conference is held once a year at different schools.