An average day for a Jesuit athlete ends with a practice after school. However, this was not the case on Tuesday, April 7th and Wednesday, April 8th, as Jesuit sports teams abstained from going to practice and, instead, built volleyball courts at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center.
Right after school, Jesuit’s crew, cycling, and basketball teams loaded onto buses and headed to the convention center, accompanied by students who are participating in the Peru Summer Immersion Trip . Once they arrived, they split up into groups of seven and were assigned to assemble volleyball courts for the upcoming Lone Star Classic Volleyball Tournament. Each court the students made raised two hundred dollars for the Jesuit athletic programs assisting with the event. The Jesuit students teamed up to build ten courts in total and raised a grand sum of two thousand dollars for the crew, 
cycling, and basketball programs. In addition, some money was also used to help pay for the students’ Summer Immersion Trip to Peru. Those who helped at the event returned to 
Jesuit at 8:30 PM, almost five hours after they departed on the buses to go to the convention center.
The volleyball courts were used in the 2015 Mizuno Lone Star Classic, the largest volleyball event in the country according to the previous year’s turnout. About 1,600 different volleyball teams used the over one hundred volleyball courts made for the event. Thomas Whitaker ’17, a member of the Jesuit cycling team, attended the event later on in the week and was “amazed at how large the event really was” and was “glad to have helped those teams have courts to play on as well as raise money for the cycling program.”
Another Jesuit cyclist, Evan Bausbacher ’17, commented that “even though it took up most of [their] evenings, it was a good bonding experience for the team” as they had to “work together to try to figure out the most efficient way to build the courts.” He also was “excited about how the cycling program will potentially use the money they gained to help the team either this year or the upcoming year.”
