By: Kayla Mitchell and Sam Gruetter

Public Relations Manager and Editor-in-Chief

Everybody and their childhood best friends have undoubtedly gone on adventures and made memories that you can all laugh at over Thanksgiving in a couple of years. Given the current trend of our expeditions, we will probably be telling these stories from inside a cinderblock cell behind iron bars, claiming that the wild Ostrich smuggled itself into the United States. However, we are currently writing this from the comfort of Sam’s bed as non-jailed individuals, so we will pretend there is a large roasted bird before us and relatives fighting at the other end of the table and proceed with some of our more daring conquests.

We all know how Columbus and several other ancient explorers searched for the fountain of youth, an artifact that would grant individuals eternal life. Well, apparently, we were searching for whatever the opposite of that is when, as children, we had the bright idea of standing on top of a car and throwing things at Kayla’s electrical wire. We wish we could say that we were just extremely interested in the field of electrical engineering, but in actuality, we were just unhinged heathens who, by some miracle, avoided Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.” Our victims of choice included a baseball bat, a juicebox, and sticks. The result? Kayla’s mom told Sam’s we needed to take a hiatus from hanging out with each other. 

There’s nothing more entertaining for two young girls than trying to recreate the popular show Survivor in our backyards. While our “ocean” was a shallow pool and our strong “raft” was a sinking pool floatie, we were prepared to outlast any real castaways. Armed only with key necessities, we brought a portable charger, a cat that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a phone to call our moms when our food mysteriously vanished five minutes into the adventure. Though we dreamed of establishing a world record and sending in an unbeatable application for our favorite show, our expedition ended when we bumped into the side of the pool, deciding that making slime was more worthy of our time.

Since wreaking havoc in the privacy of our own yards wasn’t enough for our global ambitions, we jumped at the chance to become “highly qualified” pickleball coaches for a major company. Playing pickleball only twice in our lives and lacking any type of coordination, we found ourselves teaching the game to some of the smartest engineers in the Bay Area. 

Throughout the night, we successfully hid the lack of pickleball knowledge we possessed and only lost a few straying balls in our demonstration, none of which deserved to be in our presence anyway. At the young age of seventeen, we created a masterclass of pickleballers and had The Hub begging us to be on their payroll.