Photo Courtesy of Leah DeHaemer

“My whole life, it’s no secret to anyone that knows me at all that I love sports. … But unfortunately, I have never been good enough to play sports really through high school. … My first year and a half in high school I played soccer, hung out with my five boys, but I really hadn’t found the thing I loved in high school. … And then one of my close family friends who’s really involved in the theater department dragged me to a meeting one day and convinced me to try out for Mary Poppins. [It] was the show that I tried out [for during my sophomore year], got a small part – but a fun part – [and] loved it. And that became my life for the rest of high school, along with going to support all my friends in sports, going to a lot of the sports games and even becoming the school’s public address announcer. So, when I was coming here [to Hofstra], everyone kept asking me, ‘Hey, are you [going to] continue acting? Like, what are you [going to] keep doing?’ … I knew I wanted to be a part of the radio station; that’s part of the reason why I came to Hofstra. But other than that, I knew I needed to discover something, [because] I didn’t know how I was going to make friends. … My roommate had been on the frisbee team. … I know ultimate [frisbee] is a game that is not widely known through high school, and that a lot of people first play the games when they get to college. So, I was like, ‘Heck, I’ll sign up.’ So I signed up, went to a couple of practices and as I did in high school with theater, I [kind of] just fell in love. The game is great, it’s fun. … And it’s given me a group of guys that – I’ve known them for three months now – and yet I can almost call some of them family, in a sense. It’s a group of guys that are always just chilling, really nice dudes and have helped me so much [to] get better at this sport. Which, looking at how I was at the beginning of September to now, I’m still not very good, but the growth has been exponential, and I think a lot of my teammates would agree with that. I called joining theater when I was in high school the best decision I made up to that point, and I would almost call joining this ultimate [team] the best decision I’ve made in college. … You never know where you’re [going to] be. Like, if someone told me four months ago that, ‘Oh, your whole social life basically is [going to] be the ultimate frisbee team at Hofstra,’ I would’ve been like, ‘What the hell?’ … But I’m going to make sure – I’m going to go even farther than to say I’m going to do my best – I’m going to make sure that ultimate can stay a part of my life.”