One of the most important factors in being a good athlete is being pumped and enthusiastic for your games or meets. After a long and difficult day at school, athletes are feeling less than enthusiastic. Luckily, many students have tricks and techniques they use to help get them selves, along with their teams, pumped up before games.

“Before I swim, I do this little shake dance and slap my chest to get pumped,” sophomore James Barker said. “I also like to listen to hard core, fast-beat music like Kid Cudi.”

Listening to fast and up-beat music, like country and rap, is a great way to get hyped up before a big game and is commonly used by Annandale athletes. Besides listening to music, dancing, playing games, singing, and setting goals are all ways students at AHS get their teams excited before sporting events.

“I like to play team games like “Jigolo” before my volleyball games,” junior Jenny Ha said.

“Jigolo is this fun game where basically every one on the team gets in a circle and player by player we go into the circle and dance and than the team copies the dance.” junior Claire Lazar said.

Team dances and games are infamous at Annandale High School amongst the many sports teams. Many coaches recommend that their players play these games so the team can go into the game excited and confident.

“We dance in the locker room to get pumped up before our football games,” junior Hari Mizouri said.

“As a team we like to play warm-up music which is usually a mixture of pop and rap before our Field Hockey games,” sophomore Sarah Padrutt said.

Letting your nerves get the best of you can ruin an athletes performance. That is why it is so important to stay calm, confident, and collected before games. Many of the techniques used by student athletes are not only used to get excited for their sporting events, but to get rit of last minute nerves.

“On the way to our cross country meets we joke around, talk about our goals for the meet, and just try to relax.,” sophomore Eric Mejean said.

After a school day filled with hard class work and quizzes, AHS student athletes rely on these tricks to go into their games with enthusiasm.