Brenda Gomez admits she isn't used to all the attention.

Dozens of her classmates stream by her Tuesday in the Ellis Middle School cafeteria as they make their way to their next class.

"Hey Brenda."

"Hi Brenda."

"She's the winner!"

Brenda smiles shyly, then shrugs her shoulders.

"I think it's kind of weird," Gomez said. "I've never really had this experience before."

Brenda won first place in the 2003 Minnesota Twins Father of the Year Essay Contest in the sixth grade category. She competed against other sixth graders throughout Minnesota and western Wisconsin to win tickets to a Twins game and a $50 savings bond.

"We're just so happy for her that she could do that," said Linda Goddard, her English teacher.

But Brenda wasn't thinking about winning when she wrote the essay for Goddard's class.

She was thinking of her father.

In her essay about her father, Frank Gomez, Brenda talks about walks in the park, how he helps her feel better if she falls and how he reads her bedtime stories.

"… he takes you out for pizza. And sauce gets on your favorite shirt and tears start to form in your eyes. And right away your daddy wipes sauce on his shirt. And you give a loud giggle and he joins with you," Brenda writes in her essay.

Goddard said she has her students participate in the contest each year. The Minnesota Twins and the National Center for Fathering sponsor the event and five students each place in grades 1-12. The contest is meant to improve students' writing skills and stimulate thinking about their father, grandfather or another father figure, according to the National Center for Fathering.

Every student who enters receives two Twins vouchers and a certificate of participation. In Adams, Andrea Bergstrom, a senior at Southland High School, won second place in the 12th grade category. Two years ago, Ellis eighth grader Micheala McCarty won first place as a sixth grader as well.

Brenda and Goddard are planning to attend the Twins game June 14 as well as the "Celebration of Fatherhood" at the Illusion Theater in Minneapolis, where the awards will be presented. Frank Gomez is scheduled to work that day, but is hoping he can take a day off from his bus route at Mower County Transit, Brenda said.

Brenda has not been to a Twins game before or the Metrodome.

"I think it will be exciting. It'll be something new that I never experienced," she said, noting she didn't show her father the essay until after she had won.

"He said that it was really good and he could tell it came from the heart," she said.

But her thoughts about her father don't end with the words in her essay. She said her father always thinks of others before himself, a quality she admires most in him.

"He would do anything to make me happy and that really means a lot," Brenda said.

Cari Quam can be reached at 434-2235 or by e-mail cari.quam@austindailyherald.com