My Entrepreneurship Story

Entrepreneurship is prevalent in our everyday life. Whether it is working on a project in school or being assigned a project during an internship and being creative with it to make it your own. While these are only small examples of what entrepreneurship is, they are still important. When I was in high school, I started my own little entrepreneurship venture with my older brother.

From 5th grade to 12th grade, I played lacrosse year round. It was one of my passions. In eighth grade I moved from a town where lacrosse had been established for a while, to a town where lacrosse was still relatively new and starting to take off (my high school was the only school in the county with a lacrosse program). However, there were other schools around the city that we would play against who were much more advanced as far as youth and high school lacrosse goes. Through observation, I realized that the reason that these other teams were better at the sport was because the kids on their teams had all been playing lacrosse together since their elementary school days. On the other hand, at my high school, despite a select few, most of my teammates had just started playing in high school. I saw this as a problem, and wanted lacrosse to continue to flourish even after I left for college. The solution was simple: try to get kids interested in the sport earlier, which would in turn build up the youth program and would then strengthen the high school program as these kids got older. They obvious benefit to this would be the increased skill of the players, but the less obvious, and possibly larger benefit would be the team chemistry that would build between these players as they continued to play together throughout their elementary years and into high school.

My brother and I brainstormed ideas to increase the youth exposure to the sport in our town. We ended up deciding on a summer camp that would teach kids the basic skills of the sport, but would also include fun and rewarding, lacrosse-related activities that would heighten their interest in the sport. We ran this camp for two weeks one summer in 2016, when my brother was a senior. It went great and we were able to introduce the sport to ten new players and also had ten other returners attend the camp. Not only did we make a little extra spending money this summer by running this camp, but the next year, there were many new players who had signed up to play lacrosse during the season. It was a very rewarding experience seeing the direct results of my labor and being able to share the sport that I was so passionate about with the youth in my community.

I enrolled in ENT3003 to learn more about entrepreneurship and how to be a successful entrepreneur in everyday life. I hope this class teaches me how to look at problems differently and how to think of creative solutions to these everyday problems.