Michael Henrich is a history teacher at LB who teaches five class periods, coaches the golf team and is the sponsor of the paintball interest club, although he has been especially busy this year since the golf team made it to the championships.

“The better the team does, the more school they miss,” Henrich said. “I always joke with them that I wish that they would play worse so that they could miss less school. I joke with my friends that I wish that there were 30 hours in a day.”

Henrich teaches and coaches, but is still able to balance his life outside of school.

“I like to type out events so that I can stay on track with everything,” Henrich said. “I am also a father and a husband, so that is already a huge commitment.”

He said that he encourages the use of electronic planners or the school’s agenda books to keep track of assignments and homework.

“Through email I’ll talk with [the golf team] about school and encourage them to do their homework,” Henrich said.

With long practices after school and a great amount of team effort put into the season, the golf team has managed to do extremely well.

“We only lost one of our matches,” sophomore and golfer Jinny Park said, “which is really good. I went to states twice and we won our districts.”

Henrich has been a huge team supporter and has always been pushing the team to do their best.

“Our season has gone really well,” sophomore Jasmine Gao said. “The co-ed team even made it to the Patriot Championships. The players are just really good.”

Even when not at school, Henrich tries to help his students to not fall behind on their work, since the games are during school days.

“I have one player, [sophomore] Niva Sainju,” Henrich said, “and when we were riding to a golf match, she took out her homework and just started working on it and I helped her.”
Henrich tries his best to model good time management and responsibility for his teams. He feels less overwhelmed than he was expecting, considering his busy schedule, he said.

“The paintball team is actually fairly easy,” Henrich said. “There is a junior named Nick Blake who is the president and he runs everything. I let them meet in my room, but they only need me for official work. Nick keeps everything organized. He’s excellent.”

Henrich does his best to encourage his paintball and golf teams and motivating them, but he also tries to keep an open schedule to be available for extra help and paintball meetings and golf practices, Blake said.

Henrich set aside time for early morning golf team breakfasts to help give the team a reason to get up early.

“He’s been helping us out now for about three years and he’s the only sponsor,” Blake said, “and he is so optimistic about everything and open to meet days.”

Keeping a loose schedule to be flexible with the times of paintball and golf has been extremely beneficial to his students and team members to be able to keep themselves stress-free.

“Mr. Henrich is one of my school teachers,” Gao said, “I think he does a good job with understanding that we have other classes.”

Henrich makes sure that his students do well in school and challenges them just enough to do well, Park said.

“He’s our number one supporter and he always gives us practice when we need it,” Park said.