As a student at Northeastern University, I have the opportunity to complete up to three co-ops at companies all around the world. These six month long internships provide students with the chance to gain experience and allow us to explore our interests while identifying potential career options. I am a communications major with an obsessive love of sports (Go Warriors!) and an inherent desire to use athletics as a means to help others, which made Good Sports my top choice from the beginning of the application process.

Sports have been an enormous part of my life for as long as I can remember. After learning to swim when I was three, I continued my foray into athletics with lacrosse, volleyball, tennis, soccer, and basketball. While some sports were certainly more successful than others – basketball was little more than three months of air balls – each experience had a profound impact on me. I can attribute my active lifestyle habits, ability to work in a team, and most of my competitiveness to being raised playing sports. It is an unfortunate fact that far too many children in this country do not have the opportunity to learn these lessons through sports, a problem that Good Sports is making great strides in rectifying.

I was hired in January 2015 to work specifically with the Good Sports team that focuses on the Let’s Play partnership with Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. Let’s Play provides the tools, places and inspiration to make play a daily priority. Through their partnership with Good Sports, Let’s Play has committed $2M through 2016 to help 2 million more kids become active through organized sports and fitness programs. Since January, over 725,000 kids have been impacted through this partnership, and I am so thrilled to have played a role in getting more kids in the game.

While the bulk of my position related to PR and marketing, my time at Good Sports consisted of a variety of responsibilities. Some highlights of my six months there included:

– Assisting in the planning of Legends of the Ball – our most successful fundraiser ever – raising $475,000

– Weekly trips to the warehouse that involved packing the equipment to be sent to children across the country and occasionally arranging aforementioned equipment into artistic displays for our social media pages

– An absurdly competitive game of Saint Patrick’s Day Trivia (Go Team 2!)

– A trip to Dallas for a Let’s Play donation event that impacted 188,529 kids

Thank you to the entire team at Good Sports for making this the best co-op I could have asked for!

– Logan Applewhite