Noarie Proverbs '21 Recruiting Profile

Personal statement 

Noarie Proverbs

In my life I have had the opportunity to see many different cultures; people from so many different walks of life at a really young age; which I’m so grateful for, but this also leads me to what I would now describe as an identity crisis at such a young age. Yet that is part of what makes me who I am today. 

I’m from Barbados but I spent a large portion of my formative years attending Regent International School in Dubai where I met people from countries I would have never heard of at that age. I was definitely from a country that at most only 10% of the school knew where it was; someone once told me it was the same place as the Maldives which sounded believable in my naïve mind. Since the majority of the people at my school were a different race than me, I just wanted to try my best to fit in, I hated being different and it showed. My mother would always try to throw subtle hints at me about being myself but if I’m being honest, those went through one ear and out the next. I changed how I spoke and I wanted to do everything that my peers were doing, I even wanted to look like them. Something that stays in my mind to this day even though it happened when I was at most six years old is a conversation with my best friend at that time. She asked me why my skin and hair were the way they are and I told her that it was makeup; which seemed believable to a six year old who was having a conversation with probably one of the only black people she had ever interacted with. At that time there were only four other black children in our school; one of them being my sister who is one of my biggest inspirations. This led me to take a path where a common trend was making horrible decisions. I had been involved in sports my entire life but at the time when I took this path I was playing volleyball and I soon found myself in a love - hate relationship with the sport.

Volleyball gave me an outlet to release some of my energy and playing the sport took me to places and helped me to accomplish things that I had only dreamed of before. Foremost was living and competing in the Bahamas and winning the championships two years in a row with my current team the Panthers. Slowly there were changes in my behavioral patterns and there were vast improvements in multiple areas in my life such as my grades improving to me being able to maintain grades above a 3.0 GPA. I’m unsure if the source of that change is due to volleyball alone or if it’s also because of the presence of my coaches. Anthazia Mason was my first coach when I made the Barbados youth national team in 2018 for what would be my first NORCECA tour. Her invaluable contribution to my development is why I became interested in Sports Science. I yearned to understand why one would turn to sport for relief or why you feel the way you feel when you lose or win even when there is no monetary or material award connected to your success. Also, I wanted to understand the science connected to injury as I witnessed my mother’s whole appearance change after she suffered an arm injury.

I am currently enrolled in an IB program and I know that many challenges await me as the second year of IB is known to have a quite strenuous workload but I am looking to excel in the courses taken. I will also take this time to fully embrace the program as the studies applied in IB can be useful in my collegiate life. I hope that my experiences over the next few months continue to shape me as they have proven to over the years.