Scholar Athlete: Shealyn Varbero, Shoreham-Wading River High School

It's back. The News 12 Scholar-Athlete Award sponsored by Four Leaf Federal Credit Union. Shoreham-Wading Rivers' Shailene Barbero is our first winner this school year, and Shailene is used to winning. She plays three sports, and look, she's won county or Long Island championships in all of them. This season, she's looking for her third Long Island soccer championship. Shailene is an all-county player who started as a forward but switched to center midfielder that meant less scoring and more running and more leadership now some players would not like that but Shailene embraced it I'm a very vocal person and I like to kind of be not in charge but like help others so like being in the middle I can see everyone see everything helping all parts of the field once we realized that she could do it we just really haven't taken her out um she she just sees the field she she's very coachable um we give her a visual and automatically she's implementing it just like we wanted. As a junior, Shailene helped the school start a flag football team. She saw other schools doing it and figured, why not us? Let's have some fun. In her first season, she was an all-state quarterback, passing and running for 45 touchdowns. And three months after speaking up and creating the team, she led that team to the state championship game. Literally in the state final game, I was just thinking the whole time like the crazy like what if I never decided to do that and the fact that we got there is just all because I decided to speak up and try to start something. She's also a long-time Girl Scout working on her Gold Award, the student rep on the Board of Education and a unified basketball volunteer and a member of the Suffolk County Student Athlete Leadership Board. She has a 94 unweighted GPA and like all of our winners Shailene gets a $1,000 scholarship from Four Leaf Federal Credit Union. I'm Kevin Maher.