Just over twenty yards from the net with the ball at her feet, the parents and fans rising in expectation, she shoots and she scores! Her teammates gather around her giving fist bumps, high-fives, and cheering for their teammate. In any extracurricular activity, from a sport such as soccer to a school club, students learn important lessons that help them later in life. I believe that students should be required to participate in at least on extracurricular activity because they help build character, teach important life skills, and allows students to explore different opportunities.

The first reason why students should have to participate in extracurricular activities is that it helps build character. Students learn, experience, and grow traits such as responsibility, patients, and selflessness. Sports players have to know when they might not have the best opportunity to score, and be selfless enough to pass the ball to someone who has a better chance of scoring. In extracurricular activities such as Yearbook or Journalism, students have to reach deadlines and be responsible enough to keep up with their work for that class. Extracurricular activities and classes help students become better people and build good character that they might not get without the extracurricular activities offered at their school.

The Second reason is that students learn certain life skills that they can use later, in any career they might go into. Students learn skills such as teamwork while working on projects together, from putting in a group effort to having to depend on each other to finish their own individual parts of the projects on time. Students also learn important people skills, such as talking in front of large groups of people, from doing different activities that you cant just learn from a teacher, parent, or video. A personal example of this is that, while participating in a school club, I had to speak in front of nine classes of around twenty students each. That isn't something that you can read about and then go and speak in front of a large group with confidence and without fear, you have to actually speak in front of those large groups to get over that fear and become comfortable doing while doing it. Without extracurricular activities, I wouldn't be comfortable speaking before large groups of people.

The third and final reason is that extracurricular activities give students a chance to try and experience different things. Having a variety of extracurricular activities, such as multiple sports to choose from, gives the students a chance to find new hobbies as well as likes and dislikes. For example, a student might try basketball and decide she or he doesn't enjoy playing that particular sport, then the following season they could try another sport that they may like instead. In that process they are discovering that they do not enjoy playing one sport and finding other sports or hobbies that they like instead. That helps students, especially when they are getting to their junior or senior year of high school, decide what career they want to go into or what they want to specialize in that they will actually want and enjoy doing.

Extracurricular activities are a major part of school, and I believe it's important that everyone participates in at least one, if not more. Activities, clubs, and teams give students a chance to try new things, find what they enjoy doing, and teach them lessons that they cannot learn anywhere else. Extracurricular activities are important to not only the individual students that are doing them, but everyone else that is positively affected because of those people who took the extra classes or joined a school club.