As she walks toward the uphill slope, senior Sarah Leafstrand squints her eyes to look up at the sun just beginning to beat down on the muddy grass of the serene Saratoga Gap. Tucking her hair behind her ear, a smile breaks onto her face as she begins recalling fun memories of different hiking adventures she’s taken with friends and family. Pulling on the sleeve of her funky-colored sweater, she compliments a passerby’s two dogs and strikes up a small conversation with them.

Sarah loves being outdoors and going on adventures, as staying active has always been a prevalent part of her life. Hiking, one of her favorite hobbies, is something that she often enjoys doing with her friends.

“Saratoga Gap [is] my favorite place to go,” Sarah said. “It’s a little 10-minute uphill hike and you’re at this amazing viewpoint and you can continue on hiking and there’s a trail that takes you all the way to Santa Cruz.”

Sarah’s keenness toward trying new things and pursuing adventure is a topic of admiration for her peers, including close friend Ashley Barth (12), because she is often able to push them out of their comfort zones and explore new things.

“The thing that I think of when I think of Sarah is, she’ll call me up on Thursday night and be like, ‘Hey, can we go to Yosemite this weekend?’ and we don’t end up doing it, but her willingness to go do these fun things and do these fun adventures is really defining to her,” Ashley said. “She’s definitely encouraged me to find those things in myself, and I needed that push and I thank her for that every day.”

This sense of adventure and carefreeness can also be attributed to Sarah’s relationship with soccer, one that she has had since she was around 3 years old. From a young age, her parents first put her and her twin sister Kate Leafstrand (12) in recreational soccer. This small activity that began as nothing more than a chance to be active quickly turned into one of the most important aspects of Sarah’s life.

Sarah and Ashley met in middle school, and quickly became friends over their shared experience of starting soccer from a young age. Joining the same club team during sixth grade, their relationship changed from close friends to family throughout the years.

“Obviously we improve with our ability and our skill to play soccer, but she’s grown as a leader,” Ashley said. “We started off as sixth graders, we’re the bottom of the middle school and now we’re seniors in high school, we’re co-captains of the soccer team along with her sister Kate, and not only have we all done that together, we’ve grown as leaders, we’ve grown as people and as friends and now family together and that’s pretty cool.”

As she looks back on the many years she has been playing soccer, Sarah reflects on some of her favorite memories, one being her school sophomore season that she holds dear to her heart, where she and her team won the league championship title.

“The best memory I have [with soccer] is when, two years ago, we won the league championship,” Sarah said. “We were playing against Notre Dame San Jose, which was the team we were up against for the whole season, and we had to either tie or win the game in order to win the league and then we tied the game and everyone was screaming and running towards each other so it was very exciting.”

Not only does Sarah believe that soccer has played a huge role in her life, but sports in general has always been something that she believes is extremely important for everyone in order to learn valuable lessons.

“Sports are very symbolic of real life: you have a team and people who need to work together in order to complete a goal,” Sarah said. “That translates into life in a lot of ways. You need to have trust with the people you’re working with and be able to take leadership. With soccer, that’s something that’s helped me.”

Looking back on the growth she has made during her high school years, Sarah feels she has changed most in the way she holds herself and how she allows others to perceive her.

“I started freshman year pretty timid and cared more about how I was being perceived on the team whereas now, I feel like I’m at a place where I can lead members on the team and hopefully in other aspects of life and going through high school,” she said.

Kate agrees with this sentiment, as she feels that soccer has taught them both valuable lessons on how to treat others and lead them with success and support.

Taking inspiration from her own experience playing soccer, especially being a female athlete, Sarah co-founded the Women in Sports Club (WISC) with Kate, Ashley and close friend Nikela Hulton (12), something that she feels extremely passionate and excited about. They decided to create the club due to the discrepancies they felt between spectators at boys and girls games.

“We would have very big games that would be extremely important to us in the league, and we’d look up and there’d barely be anyone from school there,” Sarah said. “It didn’t feel good and we translated that down a larger scale into differences of how male sports are represented versus female sports. We wanted to confront that and try to fix that.”

Not only does Sarah hope that through WISC, the environment of Harker will change, but she also hopes the club will help other female student athletes find solace in one another and relate to each other’s struggles.

“Sports has been incredibly important for me to find friends and different communities to be a part of, and I feel like other people, especially girls, having that opportunity to feel supported is very important,” she said.