A high school resumé worth posting on the refrigerator: Three-sport athlete. Yearbook editor. Part-time employee. Full-time student. 4.0 gpa.
For Irene Moore, that’s just Page 1.
A self-proclaimed perfectionist, the King’s West senior is a letterman in basketball, volleyball and track and field.
She helped lead the 2007-08 King’s West girls basketball team to a fourth-place finish in the 2008 Class 2B Girls State Basketball Tournament, the school’s highest finish ever, and she medaled in four events at the 2008 Class 2B Track and Field Championships, breaking school records and capturing individual league championships along the way.
Moore has since picked up a part-time job, assumed responsibility of the school’s yearbook and maintained a perfect gpa.
“My strengths are probably my determination and work ethic,” Moore said Tuesday when asked how she wears so many hats. “If there’s somebody out there who’s better than me, I’m always going to give my best effort to either beat them or match them.”
That drive stems, in part, from Moore’s upbringing as the only female in a four-sibling family, having 21-, 22- and 24-year-old brothers.
“I was always the one who got picked on so I had to retaliate in some way,” she said. “Being the only girl, they always joked around that I should have been a little brother.”
Moore, 17, said her favorite sport is basketball, but her best sport in terms of postseason accolades is track and field.
In fact, she didn’t discover basketball until about seventh or eighth grade, when brother Stanley, 21, joined her at the YMCA to practice before school, often as early as 5 a.m.
“My mindset is kind of intense and competitive in the sports arena and that has a lot to do with my brother Stanley,” she said. “He basically taught me everything I know about basketball, other than what my coaches taught me.”
The Lady Warriors failed to reach the state tournament this past season and Moore said she didn’t realize how much she loved the game — and her teammates — until the season ended. She was selected to the All-SeaTac League First Team following both her junior and senior seasons, also being named the Seattle Times’ 2B Player of the Week multiple times.
“Definitely my love is basketball,” she said. “I really, really, really miss it. I miss the team. I miss being able to come down to the gym and work out with my team everyday.”
Now, Moore is focused on returning to the state track and field championships after medaling in four events — 100-meter hurdles, 300 hurdles, pole vault and 4X100 relay — in 2008.
She believes she can medal four times this season, barring injury.
“I’ve always been a perfectionist and I don’t quit, it’s not in my nature to quit,” she said. “I see that with sports the most because it’s competitive and it’s something I can’t perfect.
“So I have to keep working at it until I can get it right. And you can never get it right, you can always improve. So that’s something that challenges me.”
But sports aren’t everything to Moore, who is currently enrolled in English, art, AP government, family living, and P.E. on top of her duties as editor of the yearbook.
She was actually forced to switch from AP calculus to art at the beginning of the year because art is a graduation requirement she neglected to fulfill while “taking all the hard classes.”
“It’s trying to maximize every minute of every day, but a lot of it has to do with just getting your work done,” said Moore of managing academics, sports and a job. “I’m not Einstein, I’m just diligent and responsible and get my work done.”
That work ethic is what those close to Moore, who works about 15 hours a week at Dairy Queen, say separates her from most student-athletes. She combines hard work with natural ability, choosing to combine the two rather than rely on one.
“If half the kids in the world had her work ethic, the world would be a better place,” said KW athletic director and track and field coach Dan Dittmer, who has coached Moore for five years. “Just a tremendous worker, always seeking to improve, always working hard to try to improve, looking for the tiniest little correction to make.”
Dittmer, who also has coached Moore in volleyball and instructed one of her math classes, said the school has seen few — if any — student-athletes of her stature.
“I don’t know of any other student in this school’s history who has done that much in that many sports and maintained a 4.0,” he said. “There are not a lot of kids who have done that, male or female.”
Set to graduate in June, Moore said she’s still weighing her college options, although she’s leaning toward the University of Washington or Seattle Pacific University to study either journalism, education or pre-medicine.
She also mentioned the possibility of playing basketball at Olympic College, but said she’d try to play basketball no matter what school she attends.
“I don’t want to be one of those people saying, ‘What if I did this, what if I did that?’” Moore said. “So I’m going to try out for the teams as a walk-on, see what they do see what they say.”