“I am an alumni of Bellaire. I ran track here and was on varsity for all four years.

I saw girls who ran track and wanted to be [an] athlete, so one of my gym teachers recommended it to me when I was in middle school; I never turned back after that. 

I have been a coach previously, and after seeing some of my former coaches still working at the school, I was like, ‘Oh, that would be really cool to get back into athletics and to coach.’ So when this position was opened up, I wanted to hop back into sports.

Being the new coach when there is a program already established is difficult because a lot of the athletes have been on the team for a while. I was like, ‘Hi, [I’m] new and I might run the program a little bit differently than what you’ve seen before.

I’m trying to get everybody on board with a different program involving some differences between what [they athletes are] doing now and what the coach did before.’

My favorite part of coaching is the team aspect. I like when the athletes get to know and encourage each other, whether they’re looking out for each other while they’re doing their workouts, [or] when we’re just hanging out. I also love seeing the growth of an athlete: when they start off tired or feeling like they’re not adequate, but then they really reach higher heights. My least favorite part is coaching all by myself. I don’t have an assistant coach this year, so managing all of the athletes paperwork is my least favorite part. 

One of the goals is to see [the team] reach state. But if the team didn’t make the goal of making state or improving this season, I wouldn’t be upset at all. One thing that I’ve learned is that sometimes successes are in the mistakes and what we don’t do well at. If we can persevere through the difficult things, I think that would actually be the best goal. Are we pulling ourselves down? Are we beating ourselves up, or are we like, ‘We got some things to learn, we have to do better.’