Morgan Conover wins essay contest sponsored by Storm
May 12, 2009
By Christopher Huber
Last March Morgan Conover decided to enter a Seattle Storm’s 2009 essay contest just for the heck of it. She didn’t expect anything to come of it. Her goal was to see how her writing stood up against other 16-year-olds from Washington.
But at the end of April, the Eastlake High School sophomore heard back from the women’s pro basketball team that she had won the contest in the 14- to 18-year-old group, for her essay about how Title IX has affected her life.
Morgan Conover
Congress enacted Title IX in June 1972 to provide equal opportunity for female athletes to play high school and collegiate sports.
“This is the first thing I’ve ever entered and I’ve ever won,” Conover said. “I have a good record — one-for-one.”
The prize for the winner: tickets to a Storm home game this season, which begins May 21.
“When I got the call from them, it was a complete surprise,” Conover said. “It was very exciting, but it’s also nice to see the recognition. It’s a feeling of reassurance, that it was exciting to be able to be compared to kids my age.”
The contest was part of the Storm’s observance of the National Girls and Women in Sports Day, said Teresa Wippel, the team’s director of communications and community relations. The 23rd annual commemoration happened nationwide Feb. 4.
“We’re thrilled to be able to give them an opportunity to express their opinion of what girls and women in sports means to them,” Wippel said.
Conover said she learned about the contest in the Review. She began with an extensive outline, based on the prompt, “How has women’s athletics impacted your life?”
“I’ve been interested in writing for a while and wanted to see how my writing would measure up against kids my own age,” Conover said. “I definitely did go over it quite a few times.”
She pared the outline down and pumped out the full essay in a matter of about four to five hours, over the span of a few days, she said.
“I was interested in writing something that wasn’t for school,” Conover said. “It was nice to write something that I actually enjoy talking about.”
Winning the essay contest boosted Conover’s confidence, she said, and actually inspired her to more purposefully pursue writing as a hobby or even a career path.
“As a student, she is very dedicated. When she walks in my classroom I would say she puts a lot of time into producing in this classroom,” said Richard Belcher, Conover’s English teacher. “She takes her time. She is very exhaustive in terms of prewriting, and because of that, it helps her organize her ideas. She understands the process of writing more so than other kids.”
Read Conover’s essay at http://www.wnba.com/storm/community/ngwsd_09_conover.html.
Learn more about the National Girls and Women in Sports Day at http://www.aahperd.org/ngwsdcentral/template.cfm.
Reporter Christopher Huber can be reached at 392-6434, ext. 242, or chuber@isspress.com.
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One small correction – Title IX wasn’t passed to give girls an equal opportuntity in sports, it was passed to help girls in all areas.
Not only that, Feminists and vote-grubbing politicians have turned it into a vindictive sexist tool, thus actually being self-defeating. In fact, Title IX opperates under the assumption that girls are so pathetic at sports and so ignorant of the benefits, that we should punish boys for girls’ interests and abilities.
Who says social studies is a bad subject. Look at this, some one put their talents of writing “A” work into a more profitable approach.
Way to go!