In ninth grade, Palmer Trinity School junior Pamela Ascobereta had to play golf on the boy’s team because there was no golf team for girls.
“I was the only girl on the boys’ team in ninth grade,” she says.
As an individual that year, she qualified for districts and went on to the regional competition.
The next year, she went out and recruited more girls to play golf.
“And we had a team,” she says.
She needed four girls to make up a team. They had five.
The first year playing as a team, the girls made it through districts and on to the regional competition.
This year, they had eight girls on the team and they blew through districts, regionals and went on to the state competition. They didn’t win states, but Ascobereta says the experience was incredible.
“This is year two of having a team,” she says.
Ascobereta has been playing golf since she was four. She started at Palmer Trinity in sixth grade and joined the golf team in ninth grade.
Outside of school, she plays on the Deering Bay Golf team.
“We play Inter-Clubs as a team and I also play as an individual,” she says.
They play against other golf clubs such as Riviera, Doral, the Biltmore and Miccosukee.
Outside of sports, she’s in the Student Government Association as a class representative. She’s also a Student Ambassador.
When she talks to parents and students doing tours, she usually brings up how many relationships she’s made at Palmer Trinity and how important the school is to her as a whole.
She credits what she’s learned at school for earning her the Judy Andrews Leadership Award.
Currently she’s president of Vestry, the group in charge of creating the chapels.
“Whenever we have a religious day or holiday and we celebrate it in school,” she says. “We do it for all holidays, it for Jewish, Buddhist holidays as well as Christian.”
She’s been in Vestry since eighth grade and is in her second year as president. She expects to be president next year as well.
“What’s most important to me is that all students, especially the younger ones, can learn about the different religions that people in Palmer practice,” she says.
Ascobereta is a member of Model United Nations. She recently came back from a conference at Stanford University that she calls lifechanging. It moved her to see young people from all over the country representing countries they are not from. She finds Model UN valuable for a variety of reasons including learning how to speak in public and awareness of world problems.
She usually participates in three conferences a year. This year she’ll be a conference chair for the conference that Palmer will host in March.
“This is the first time we’re going international,” she says. “People from Ecuador are going to be joining us.”
Ascobereta is a member of the Student Diversity Council and the Latin American Club.
“Once a month we teach other student about different hot topics or problems that are occurring in the world,” she says. “Last month we talked about anti-Semitism.”
Originally from Mexico, Ascobereta moved to Miami when she was ten. She hasn’t forgotten her home country and with her mom, about three years ago she began selling bags made by Mexican women inmates.
“We sell them so they have something to do while in prison,” she says. “They are learning skills.”
Some of the proceeds from the sales are sent to the inmates for the bags made out of reusable plastic.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
