Accomplishments

This past season and semester have been pretty incredible in the life of El Grupo.

We won the State Championship in the inaugural season of the High School Mountain bike league.

We have won many races and have been invited to attend some pretty prestigious camps.

We have been awarded one of the biggest grants that any group gives out that is locally based.

We moved into a bigger space and were able to hold our first Kidicall mass from our location.

All of these are great accomplishments and should be noted and we should be proud of them.

However two recent acknowledgements and awards that have befallen a current rider and alumnus thrill me more than any of these.

Recently Logan Boyd was awarded the Gates Millennium Foundation Scholarship. This scholarship is highly coveted and incredibly hard to get. Logan has been involved with El Grupo since he was 11 years old and has been instrumental in helping shape the team into what it is today. To think that I had a small part in helping him achieve this award is just awesome. Congratulations. This scholarship has the potential to carry him through to a doctorate if he chooses certain collegiate fields of study. Its as great as they come.

Also Julia Liatti the first ever female to join the team many years ago will be graduating from the U of A this semester with Honors and has recently been accepted to join the Peace Corps. In October she should be heading off to work in Jordan for two years to work in youth development. She chose that line of work because of her time with El Grupo and all that she does and has experienced.

Both Logan and Julia attend/ ed Tucson High and allowed me to write recommendation letters for them. I was humbled to speak for them and excited to know that the local high school produced such incredible scholars.

These great accomplishments did not come easy for them. They must have been scared when they started the journeys. They knew that they could have not been accepted or awarded, but they had the courage to try. They had the self confidence to give it a shot and to know that to not try would be the greatest failure of all.

I hope El Grupo helped them learn this lesson. Its the most important lesson I want to teach every one on the team. That to try and to believe in one self is the definition of success.

These success are the some of the greatest triumphs in the history of the team and I hope they inspire others on the team to dream these dreams. Congratulations to Logan and Julia.

I could not be prouder, and thank you Leo for encouraging me to write this. You were right that I needed to ensure that this was expressed.