My whole life I have lived in Saint Helen, Michigan. For those who don’t know where Saint Helen is or where it is located, see the picture below.
The total amount of people who live in this small town is about 2,668, including some people that live in the Roscommon-Saint Helen line. While some might think this is quite a bit of people, my friend who lives in Livonia has about half of Saint Helen’s population in her entire high school. There are always some positives and negatives to living in a small town. Some positives are that there isn’t much traffic so you don’t have to plan 15 minutes ahead to go across town. Usually takes me about 5 minutes give or take depending on the one stoplight we have in town. Also, it usually takes someone over an hour to go to a lake or to find a decent fishing area. In my town, we have one lake that does it all! Perfect for fishing and swimming! Some people also find it hard to go trailing with snowmobiles or their four-wheelers, well St. Helen has multiple trails to go on and roads that you can go down that you wouldn’t have to worry about getting hit by a car. There are some negatives though to living here. With living up north, you have to drive at least an hour to get to a decent shopping mall, while people who live in the city could easily drive five minutes and be there. Also, most of my friends that I go to college with, live about 2 hours or more south of me, so I can’t randomly drive down to see them and it has to be a thought out plan.
Going to a small school:
I went to Roscommon High School, where right now there are only 412 people that are enrolled at the school. When I graduated in 2013, I only graduated with 100 kids and it could have been less. Most schools down in southern Michigan have over 300 students in their grade. So some negatives to this were that everyone knew your business or had about three facts they knew about everyone there. While having such a small amount of students, you met your best friends and got really close with each other. A problem going to a small school is that there is a very minimal amount of decent looking boys. Once there was a good looking guy at least one girl and three of her best friends have dated him within the past four years of high school, gross right? I tended to stay away and focus on sports.
Sports:
There are no clubs around where I live. If you decide to play club it’s about an hour and a half drive to find the nearest club. But sometimes even driving all that way, your sport still wasn’t a club sport in the area. Roscommon had the simple sports that every school had, football, cross country, golf, soccer, track, wrestling, basketball, baseball/softball, and volleyball. No tennis, lacrosse (didn’t even know of lacrosse until college), swimming, or bowling. While some think that we have a lot of sports, there are multiple other schools that offer all these and were still a good team. Playing a sport at Roscommon, you could literally have no experience playing it but end up playing on varsity a year later. For people that disagree, that was me. I didn’t play basketball in middle school or my freshman year of high school. My sophomore year I played junior varsity basketball and my junior and senior year I played varsity and still went on to Olivet College to play basketball for two years. Most schools you play one or two sports and then play club for your favorite sport. At Roscommon you don’t play club unless you’re willing to drive. But here you play three sports whether you are good or not. I played volleyball, basketball, and soccer. While I tried to find some club soccer to play, there wasn’t a close area that offered it. The closest place at the time was about 2 hours away.
