Surrounded by students frantically studying, excitedly talking to their friends or responding to Snapchats before their first period classes, sophomore Yuyu Katahira moves through a chaotic hallway. When she finally reaches her locker, a smile crawls across her face as she sees a sign reading “Hey! Hey! Yuyu, I’ll bet ya that you’re gonna win!” taped to her maroon locker. As she prepares for her hectic day ahead, the simple sign in front of her eases her nerves.

Beyond shared practices and competitions Lab sports teams bond through similar and unique activities.   

One of the many ways the girls swim team bonds is through locker buddies. Each member of the team picks a name out of a hat at the beginning of the season. Before each swim meet the swim team members put food in their buddy’s locker and every once in awhile change the sign on their locker or give them a note.

Yuyu said that this is one simple way the swim team connects, and gets to know other swimmers on the team.

“Locker buddies just gets our entire team really excited before games, and a plus side is the candy,” junior Erin Rogers said about the volleyball team’s similar tradition of locker buddies.

This year, the girls tennis team decide to do locker buddies among all three teams – freshman/sophomore, JV, and varsity.

“It definitely has helped us get closer,” senior Florence Almeda said. “There’s a ton of new members on the team this year and locker buddies has made us go out of the way to get to know them.”

Rather than bonding through notes and candy, senior Harrison Shapiro said a lot of the bonding on the cross country team occurs during practices.

“One of the advantages of running for practice is we have 45 minutes to an hour of just running with our friends, and we talk the whole time,” he said.

At the beginning of the boys soccer season, Coach Josh Potter, a first year gym teacher and coach at U-High,  took the varsity team to a park where he’d created soccer challenges for them as a way to bond, junior Jacob Beiser said.

“He split us into three groups, and he said, ‘The team that comes out at the end of the day with the most points gets a free dinner with me,’ and we’re all, like, ‘OK, that’s awesome, we’re gonna try our best,’” Jacob said.

Some of the challenges the team had to complete included kicking a ball through three rings and kicking the ball down a slide and trapping it.

Jacob said these challenges, especially the competitive aspect, really brought the players together as a team.

One of the things Coach Potter emphasizes a lot is family, Jacob said. He reminds the team that no player is better than another and you have learn to love the other players on the team.

There is a strong emphasis on equality on the girls swimming team, too, Yuyu said.

“All of us are really close because we’re not separated between teams like frosh/soph, JV and varsity,” she said. “We’re all one team, and we all practice together in the same pool once or twice a day.”

Though the team is divided into maroon and white, both the coaches and the seniors ensure that that no one on the team ever says JV and varsity in order to avoid team division.

“We always talk about how everyone has to work hard because the team is only as strong as the weakest link,” Yuyu said. “Knowing that makes everyone work a lot harder and get to know everyone more, and it really helps the team.”

One of the ways all of these teams bond is through pasta parties.

Harrison explained that bonding as a whole team is especially difficult bcause they are a co-ed team.

“For us we try to make sure that having two technically separate teams are fundamentally one unit,” he said.

At pasta parties the team as a whole has the opportunity to hang out together.

“I feel just as close to the girls team as the guys team which I feel is something very unique for co-ed sports. Especially because we don’t run at the same paces, we don’t even run at the same meets sometimes,” Harrison said.

The seniors on the girls swim team always make the pasta parties mandatory, Yuyu said.

“When I first got into high school and did that, I was really confused because I was, like, ‘I don’t know any of these people. Why am I going to dinner with everyone?’ But once you go there you learn that just putting yourself there you get to know so many people, and when everyone is put in that situation, we just bond so much more.”

“I’ve gotten to know people that I never would have met had I not done the swim team,” Yuyu said.

Jacob said that the pasta parties definitely brought the team much closer together.

He said, “It’s especially events like that where you cross over from the sports aspect to the personal friendship aspect and that’s very important for team bonding.”