Final Experience Reflection

SportHQ of Cary has a mission to improve every athlete that walks into the building, in a structured yet relaxed environment, through Futsal leagues, performance training, and camps.  The business caters to all athletes, whether they are a professional at the peak of their career, a youth first testing sports or a focused teen preparing for a collegiate athletic career.   By providing excellent, high level coaching SportHQ can accelerate any individual’s development as long as the athlete wants to improve.  SportHQ takes pride in developing athletes; especially youth athletes who want to improve.  This company is dedicated to helping athletes reach their full athletic potential.

As an intern at SportHQ, I had a variety of jobs.  Often, I would create targeted advertisements and flyers to promote business for specific groups of people and took pictures to upload to the website and social media such as Instagram.  I updated the company website with up to date details and a more professional layout that made more sense than previously.  As a coach in the performance training area of SportHQ, I worked with athletes to maximize their athletic potential in a small group setting, specifically working on speed, agility, strength training, flexibility and injury prevention.  Throughout this Internship one of my jobs was to keep track on athlete’s improvement. We gave them a baseline assessment at the beginning of their training and retested every 6 weeks to measure improvement, such as testing vertical and broad jump, and accurate times of sprinting a given number of yards.

The work atmosphere of SportHQ is relaxed, but also extremely competitive in a cooperative way. Everyone that walks into the doors of SportHQ is there to get better, improve, and train.  The athletes are competing against themselves while also helping others and being understanding of the other athlete’s same desire for self-improvement in their athletic ability.  The dress code at SportHQ is professional in the sense that we had to wear something, often being a t-shirt, that had the company’s logo on it, to separate us from those we were working with.  There are times while working when it is right to have fun, but also you had to know when to be serious, because the goal is to get things done. Decisions are made in the best interest of the company and the athletes who walk through the doors.

         My classroom experiences have prepared me for this internship by having experience in good communication and work ethics with others, time management, and mainly multimedia and webpage design for things such as the website and flyers.  The experience of my internship has fully met my expectations and objectives. It has exposed me to gain knowledge and experience of the workforce and has really given me a clear vision on which way I want to head with my future career.  Opportunity to learn and enhance my personal skill and knowledge is what I planned on getting out of this Internship, and thankfully I can say that I did.

I am proud to say that my main contribution to my internship was to expose the company to a wider range of people and help SportHQ really take a bigger step in marketing, promoting business.  Also, as a coach in the performance training area of SportHQ, working with athletes helped them take bigger steps in improving their athletic ability and reaching their goals.  I enjoyed helping them and making them better, because I feel as if I had an impact on where they stand now.

When I first took over the role, I noticed that my coordinator had been very unorganized due to his lack of technology skills and the amount of work and time he had being the director of performance.  He had unorganized notes and plans all over the desk in handwriting that no one could read, outdated testing numbers of athletes to help them manage the athlete’s progression, the website was a mess, etc.  This was clearly wasting a significant amount of time and money, so I made life easier for him.  I used Excel to create organized spreadsheets and went through all of the athlete’s progression folders and updated and organized them as they came in and out and cleaned up the SportHQ website.  Doing this at the beginning of the internship allowed my boss to gain more trust in me, because he was able to see that I was full of ideas to help his job be that much easier than he was making it.  This gave me useful, additional experience and also freed up my internship coordinator to spend more time on other issues.

As an intern at SportHQ, it gave me the opportunity to work hands on in a professional environment. It helped me learn more about the career path I plan on pursuing.  Since internship opportunities help set the foundation for careers, it was important that I chose my internship based on my interests, being sports marketing.  My internship also provided me the opportunity to work with someone who has become a mentor for me - not only in the internship but throughout my life. Interning gave me the opportunity to practice communication, time management, and teamwork skills.  I am still interested in pursuing my college career in the sports marketing field.

My summer internship was an opportunity to test drive a career without making any serious commitments. Most importantly, my internship provided me with experiences, lessons, and tools I need to be successful in my future career path.  By the end of my internship, I had a clearer idea that I really do want to enter that field or pursue that general more casual hands on occupation, rather than sitting behind a desk all day.

Although I rarely got frustrated during my time as an intern, experiencing training children that didn’t want to train and rather play around and not listen, was difficult for me as a competitive athlete. I handled this by being patient with them, and really putting an effort in to understand and hear them out.  As my connection grew with the children athletes, the training seemed to progress.  I realized that the children gained more than just a work out by being there, but at that age it is important to grow their motivation and passion in life.