Why Basketball Is Important To Me

Basketball is a sport that requires great attention, sacrifice, and dedication to be great at and win games. Practices are long, hard, and tiring. Even though, practices can be gruesome, the amount of good things that come out of the hours spent in the gym are worth the pain. Coach Coleman always preaches, “If you truly want to be great at something, you have to be willing to give up something else you love in order to be great at the other thing you love.” Whether that is about basketball for a person or not, I have tried to live my life by that so I can be great. During basketball practice, Coach is an inspiration and pushes me to be the best I can possibly be. I do drill after drill in order to better myself for the next game or opponent I play. The amount of dedication and determination he requires from me is something I strive to meet in each moment whether that be practice, games, or outside of basketball. I sacrifice a lot of free time in order to reach the bar that he has set for me. The time spent striving for greatness is well worth it when the feeling after winning a game washes over me. Anyone who has ever been great at something had to make a lot of sacrifices to reach that level.
However, being great at something is almost never reachable alone. Basketball is a team sport. Coach not only pushes me but also pushes the team as a whole. As we go through the pain, that practice brings, together we become more of a family than a team. Some people think becoming more like a family can be a bad thing because it will cause arguments throughout the team, but brothers and sisters argue all the time right? An argument does not equate to weakness it equates to passion. When this basketball team runs, scrimmages, plays and argues together we become even closer than we were the day before. These arguments do not mean that there is separation within our team but simply means we are even closer than any coach could hope