PROGRESS: A giant balancing act

What is contained in a day in the life of Grace Britten, a busy senior at Nodaway Valley High School? A simple answer would be, “a lot.”

Some might say Britten, 18, the daughter of Brian and Laura Britten, is a good representative of a student in small town Iowa who desires to get her feet wet in many pursuits. She says she’ll see the benefits of it later in life.

“My freshman year, I just wanted to try a ton of different things. That’s how I got into wrestling and brain bowl,” Britten said. “I just want to do the best I can in everything. I know that I’m not exactly an all-star athlete or the smartest kid in my class, but i just want to do the best I can with what I’ve got.”

Britten has perhaps gone to the highest levels of notoriety for her efforts in girls wrestling. She’s been a pioneer for the sport locally, having been one of the first three girls to compete in a state wrestling tournament from her school. The others were Rose Lonsdale and Erin Rhoads.

Soon after, the SWAT (Southwest Area Team) girls wrestling program began, including Atlantic, CAM, Nodaway Valley, Griswold and Southwest Valley. Britten dove head first into that program and has two state medals to show for it in the sanctioned era of the sport.

Grace thinks the experience of growing up with brothers Thomas and Michael, who are 23 and 21, respectively, prepared her for such an intense sport. Her younger sister is Caroline.

Earlier on as a child, softball and little league soccer were Britten’s sports of choice.

Britten loves the arts. She’s been involved in numerous visual arts endeavors in school and plays tenor saxophone in the band. She played mallet percussion in a recent percussion ensemble. At a young age, she learned to play the guitar.

Britten also works hard in the classroom. She has a 3.988 grade point average. She is enrolled in college calculus and a college literature class while also taking high school courses.

The high school courses meet every other day because Nodaway Valley utilizes block scheduling. She said this gives a little more breathing room to her academics so she can more easily prioritize work that needs to be done.

The college classes often have midnight deadlines where work has to be posted online, and that gives her a real-world look at satisfying hard deadlines.

“I often will focus on the next ‘do’ thing,” Britten said. “Sometimes I can end up cramming right up until something’s due. I’ll usually do English before math.”

Britten prides herself on being a jack of all trades, it is clear. She said it’s hard to say whether she’s more athletically or artistically-wired. Right now she’s out for track and field, throwing and running for the Wolverines. She’s also involved in faith formation programming at her church and is doing a work experience internship with the Creston News Advertiser.

“I started art earlier because I really enjoyed art starting when I was in elementary school, so I’ve been able to develop that,” said Britten. “I definitely started leaning more toward athletics in high school. I’ve still really enjoyed my art classes, but I’m going to wrestle in college, so I’ve geared toward that more.”

Do arts and athletics complement each other? Britten says that they can.

“Music can help me focus before a match, or when I’m mad, I may write poetry or something,” Britten said.

Another way the arts and athletics can complement each other is a person’s development of attention to detail or general commitment, Britten said. Skills like these can be what job recruiters are looking for.

“Tons of jobs value a fine art skill. It can be attention to detail or creative thinking. Showing athletic ability also shows discipline and a commitment to something that you’re passionate about,” Britten said.

While most of what Britten has signed up to do is strictly voluntary, she said there is a chance that some kids today are stretched too thin with commitments. She said it depends on the person.

“Sometimes class loads can be really conflicting with what we all need to get done,” Britten commented. “It really depends on the student and how much they can handle. Maybe kids can’t handle as much as they used to. Attention span, focus, and things like that [may play into that].”

Britten would disagree with people who say kids are up to no good these days. She said they should take a wider-angled look at kids before passing judgment.

“They’re maybe looking at 5-10% of my generation. A few bad apples can spoil the bunch,” Britten said. “I think most kids don’t get recognized as much because it has always been that it’s the kids you don’t expect to do well who get rewarded when they do well. The kids who have always done well are expected to and don’t get recognized nearly as much.”

Her drive to be who she is also comes from Britten’s childhood and family in which she was brought up.

“The way my parents raised me was one of the biggest factors into who I am,” Britten said. “Also, my older brothers. I look up to them and have always wanted to be just like them. That probably played a lot into wrestling, even though neither of them did wrestle.”