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I am making the below comment under the leadership section on my resume.
I would like to know if the following sentence is grammatically correct, and whether I can replace 'was' with 'had been' in the first half of the sentence.
I was ordained for captaincy in high school, and undertook various leadership responsibilities during college.
"Was" is better here. Using the past perfect "had been" connotes "I was team captain only for a while". While this is true, it's unnecessary since you obviously left high school, so it implies that you perhaps were not captain all the way through until the end of high school. But even then it's unnecessary and a bit of an awkward construction. Use "was".
With regards to the sentence as a whole, "ordained" usually carries a religious connotation and "captaincy" is obtrusively formal here (and rarely used anyway). Makes it sound like you're trying too hard. Consider:
Served as team captain on high school football squad and as president of the debate club at Yale.
