Being a Wilde Lake athlete, you constantly see the stigma and the category that the rest of Howard County puts us into: ghetto.

I saw this stigma even before I came here, with people’s faces dropping when I told them where I was districted to go.

People I’ve known for years have moved or attend private schools in order to avoid what they thought was the worse case scenario: coming to Wilde Lake.

When I talk to friends from other schools, they ask what it’s like to go to Wilde Lake and how I deal with the problems they assume come with the school and the sports here.

Honestly, I feel bad. They will never be able to understand how great this school really is. I love the feeling of being the underdog.

The feeling when people are expecting you to lose and then proving them wrong.

The role of high school is to prepare you for life and life is diverse; so why not prepare where diversity excels?

No matter what we do it seems like it will always be an uphill battle to break out of that image.

Don’t get me wrong, we have made progress.

From the sportsmanship cup to a county championships in track, soccer, and golf, people see specks and glimmers of our true character but somehow despite all of this revert back to their old views.

It is our job to make them see us, to make them really see us.

To prove that their assumptions about us and our characters are in fact assumptions and that we are way more than people give us credit for.

As athletes we like a challenge, so let’s accept this one.