I watch as Courtney walks around the Gordy Dining Hall like a local celebrity, greeting everyone with a friendly hello. She’s beaming with radiance as everyone yells her name. If you knew Courtney just a year ago, you would never believe that this was the same girl. Through hard times and efforts to make some changes in herself, she has truly come a long way, despite personal a family struggles.
Courtney Haynes is a Reinhardt Univer-sity sophomore who is a vital part of our campus. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, in a single-parent household, Haynes’s tough times caused her to grow up more quickly than she may have wanted to, leaving her without much of a childhood. Lacking a strong mother figure, circumstances forced Haynes to look after her younger brother. She found it hard to raise a growing man, especially when her father and brother didn’t have the best relationship.
Like many girls, she participated in cheerleading, dance, and various other activities in and out of school, but she found that lacrosse helped her out the most. Bottling a lot of anger from her family issues, Haynes found lacrosse to be an escape. She played lacrosse in high school for two years.
Wanting to follow her lacrosse career into college, she got accepted into a university in Illinois but unfortunately didn’t receive the scholarship she needed.
Two weeks after this devastating news, however, she received a call from Rein-hardt’s lacrosse coach. When the coach called her, it was not hard to make a decision as to where she wanted to go to school.
On her visitation day, she saw the beauty and the diversity of the Reinhardt campus and its community and decided this was the place for her. However, she soon became very nervous about leaving her brother and home behind.
Despite her hesitations, she wanted to model for her brother Cobe that he had limit-less opportunities that come with hard work, so she knew that if she succeeded in college, it would inspire him as well.
When she first moved on campus, Haynes was very anti-social and secluded herself, only interacting with her teammates on the lacrosse team.
In order to force herself to be more open, she began to attend various campus events and began to speak to people that she normally wouldn’t have interacted with. Upon receiving a lacrosse injury, she was
Courtney doing the dab dance
Courtney Haynes and teammates before a Reinhardt football game.
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