In ninth-grade, I was on the C team and my basketball coach explained to me that it was because he wanted to keep me and my sister together. However, my tenth-grade season came and I was again on the C team, while my younger sister was on the JV team. I was devastated. I had never felt like so much of a failure. My younger sister was better than me and I just wanted to quit. But, how could I give up on something I had put so many years into? Then I realized that I am not my sister and her talents are not my talents. I could contribute differently from her. So, I continued to work hard and my efforts paid off. Junior year I was starting for the JV team and it was clear that my improvements are what I truly cared…
I have had multiple experiences with being on a team. For over a year I have played with a group of friendly people on a Minecraft server and have worked as a team building with this team / group of friends. I have learned a lot from them and I have offered them a lot of advice too. I am very skilled in working in teams as I have played with one for a long…
It was a frigid, windy, Friday night in October. The only light was the bright and beaming illumination of the stadium lights projecting over the soccer field. The bleachers were full, it seemed as if the whole school was there, and as a freshman with anxiety, it made it hard to cope with the fact, that I was going to be a starter for the varsity soccer team.…
My freshman year, I decided to join my high school Cross Country team. When I started running, it quickly became clear that I was not a gifted athlete. I was slow and often did not enjoy the sport. When the season first started, it took me forty minutes to run a 5k. This time was appalling but oddly, it was what kept me from giving up. There were times when I wanted to quit and go back to never running but the thought of that forty-minute 5k stopped me from doing so. I stayed on the team and pushed myself harder and harder every day. When I felt like stopping, I made myself go even further. I came to practice every single day and sometimes I stayed late. On the days that we did not have practice as a team, I ran on my own. I was dedicated…
Last year, it was my first year when I work in the female soccer team from my old high school. This was a soccer team where I was a goalkeeper trainer. This team was the high school soccer team representing the local High school. The purpose for our team was to win all the games against other schools, another of our goals was to have fun and to stay active; my personal goal was to train the goalkeepers the best I can and make them better soccer players. The best reward we all get was the feeling of been the winning team, the feeling that we all get after realizing how hard work has paid off. That is always the best feeling, to win games. The best reward I get personally is just to know that I trained the goalkeeper the right way, and they had…
From the day I could walk, I was involved in sports. From playing tee-ball in the backyard with my dad when I was three, to trying three new sports as a senior, athletics have been an integral part of my life. In my elementary school days, I tried every sport that was offered through the Jefferson Parks and Recreation. This included baseball, football, wrestling, karate, soccer, and tennis. Through middle school, I dropped several of these sports to focus on my two favorite sports, baseball and wrestling. Training for these two sports never ended and most of my time was spent either on a baseball field or on a wrestling mat. Entering my high school years, baseball and wrestling were the only sports I competed in. By my sophomore year, I was…
When at the age of five, my parents began to experiment with and place me in many different activities. The first activity was gymnastics, which was a complete failure. The gym instructor would lift my body to the high bars so I can get a feel for it and in that moment I knew it wasn’t for me. The second activity my parents decided I should try next was track and field. Track was fun at first, I actually like to run and I was pretty fast, I believed. When I joined the track team the season was going to begin soon only giving me three weeks to prepare myself for my first track meet. I trained for a while thinking I was decent ready for what life has to throw at me, then the day of the track meet arrived.…
One extremely important activity outside of the classroom that has helped me grow as an individual is Church League basketball at my local YMCA. From the outside looking in this league seems to be a form of glorified pick-up basketball with referees and a scoreboard but there is so much more to it. Almost half way through my junior year my father convinced me to try out for the varsity basketball team at school in November to which I hesitated at first but later gave in and tried out only to be cut. At first I was upset because I had never been cut from a team and I was unsure of how to handle it and what to do with my free time. This prompted me to reach out to God and ask him for a sense of direction and purpose in this time of my life to which He responded with a friend inviting me to Church League basketball. Once I experienced a few scrimmages and practices I decided to commit to playing Church League and coming to all of the…
I don’t know exactly where I am going. Maybe this comes as a shock to those who think that because someone has good grades, they have their live figured out. It astonishes me just how mistaken this view is. Being born in Cuba I was limited as to what options I had for my life path. Consequently, the transition from one country to another when I was just twelve years old was very frustrating and tough. Somehow I managed to get a grasp of the language and progressively ascend from the lowest English classes to the most advanced in my school. I never failed to be hard on myself though, and I apply this concept to almost everything I do. However, this way of thinking has not come at no cost. My thinking process can be quite obsessive at times.…
In my town’s Little League, everyone gets a trophy and a high five from the coach. When I decided to try out for my high school’s baseball team, I had the mindset of Little League: you show up and you play.…
The stands were already getting packed and the crowd getting louder as we all walked off of the buses and into the locker rooms of Doc Harris. Inside it was as quiet as a library. My teammates quickly started to strap their gear on and do what was necessary to prepare for one of the biggest games of the season. As I did the same, I thought back to that week of practice and remembered that most of the players that played varsity at my defensive position were hurt and a big part of me hoped that this would be my chance to start in my first varsity football game, a dream that had consumed my mind since the end of the previous football season.…
By being told to quit something just because I’m not good at it. Back in my 7th grade year when I played football, I was pretty atrocious at everything basically. Trying to run routes against corners, catching, and trying to stay at 110%. I used to play Wide Receiver but they made me change positions because I didn’t try hard enough. They moved me to o-line and I was probably one of the worst players on the team. I only started one game my middle school life as a guard and all I really did was get embarrassed. Missing blocks, not pulling to get the DE, and forgetting the snap count. I didn't play football my 8th grade and my freshman year because my parents said that allergy season was gonna be awful. I was so close to not playing this year,…
The Summer of 2014, I was a rising freshman in high school. My goal was to make the varsity basketball team as a freshman. Tryouts came along and I played JV over the summer. As I kept working during the summer and fall, the winter regular season tryouts came. I was determined to make the Varsity roster. I tried my best during tryouts, two days later the rosters came out. I read on the website, "Hunter Patterson JV." I was disappointed but knew that the coach thought that was the best fit for me.…
Throughout my softball career I have been a team player and leader. I often played as a utility player adapting to the team’s needs. My sophomore year of high school, myself and another teammate were co-captains. After getting hurt that season, I decided on starting the first Unified sports team at my high school. When creating the program, I wanted to create an inclusive environment that fostered teamwork and sportsmanship between people with intellectual and/or physical disabilities and those without disabilities. I believe that by playing sports myself was very instrumental in the success of the program I established. The Unified team that I play on has some of the best comradeship I have had on a team. Personally, I have seen a change in my sportsmanship. I have seen a return of the care-free pure enjoyment of…
When we joined the team, we were put with a friend from band, this kid we didn't know, and somebody from Ally's math class. Things were great over the summer. My band friend, Liam, was very close to me at the time so we would always talk about our ideas but that sort of left us cut off from the rest of the team. Of course I would talk to Ally but it was nowhere near the amount towards Liam.…