TASL 2008 Intern Walks the Walk for Women's Sport and for PE Too

TASL was lucky to have Rebecca Chinsky as our 2007-2008 Intern. Chinsky herself did not rely on luck to get the TASL position: her hard work during high school and long hours of practice, however, did.

Rebecca hails from Baltimore, Maryland, where she was a three-sport athlete at her high school, a team captain of her soccer team, winner of numerous awards, among them the Sportsmanship Award for basketball and Most Valuable Player Award in lacrosse. Most significantly, she was honored two years in a row her junior and senior years as Female Athlete of the Year. And to top it all off, Rebecca was an academic star and involved in many community service activities, including work with her synagogue and in leadership and participating roles in the Maccabi Athletic movement.

At TASL, we first met Rebecca when she was a senior in the Division of Kinesiology program at the University of Michigan, majoring in Physical Education, when she applied for the TASL internship. According to Rebecca, what interested her in the position was our mission of "getting females more involved in athletics and a healthy lifestyle." 

And true to her word, Rebecca spent the winter months helping our President Meg Seng to market our sixth annual Future Coaches Camp in June and then stayed on to work at the camp, which attracted a small but dedicated group of exceptionally talented young women from around the state. 

Like the supporters and friends of TASL, Rebecca worries about the lack of physical activity and the drop off in sport participation by young women during high school. As a PE major, and interested in joining the teaching profession, Rebecca believes that it is very important to increase the amount of time girls spend in PE classes during the school year, and favors adding after school physical activity programming for girls who want to be active, but who are not involved in school team sports.

Above all, for Rebecca, physical activity and sport should be enjoyable and worth doing for a long time. Rebecca continues to put her beliefs in practice: this fall she is finishing her student teaching in the Ann Arbor area. We know that Rebecca will take the TASL mission and what she has learned from her TASL internship with her as she gets her students moving...into the PE profession. 

For more information on TASL's paid internships click here.