College Admissions Essay-Personal Narrative-Rowing Team

The next six months consisted of me reluctantly training junior varsity color guard. The first drill meet came and I, single handedly, lost our team 20 points (a big deal since we are scored out of 100). Needless to say, we didn’t win. I decided to keep at it and give it one more try, but, I wasn’t feeling too good about continuing as the commander. By the time we were on the bus back from the second drill meet I had led my team to two losses. I was done, I was frustrated and tired. It didn’t help that Russell, the kid in charge of the JV military drill team had secured two first place wins, with perfect scores.

As I looked backed at what seemed to be a decent sized wave, I started paddling with all my might, digging through the water, deeper and deeper. The wave came closer and I felt a push from my cousin as I caught the wave. “Stand up” my cousin yelled behind me as the monstrous wave began to swallow me up. I stood up, rode the wave all the way to the shore, and fell in love with the sport of surfing. Since that day, I have loved everything one could ever love about the sport: The salty water as it touched my body, the push of the wave as it stood me up on my smooth yet sticky board, and the exhilarating rush that I felt after every perfect ride. But not quite everything about the sport came easy to me, it took a long ride to find the love I have for the sport today. When I first started competitively surfing, I

As if I had unconsciously alienated myself from the squad. But no matter what I did I couldn’t shake the quasi -mental abuse that I had endured from cheer phi earlier on. No one likes to feel like the black sheep. But being a rebel was embedded in my DNA since birth. After all the separation, stress, and burdens of my financial obligations. I had contemplated quitting the team. I figured that if I didn’t want to be a part of cheer phi and if I couldn’t afford being on the team then why bother. One of the cheer phi members overheard me discussing my plan to the coach .I immediately got defensive and was silent the whole practice thinking that they were happy that I was leaving.

One thing I have a strong passion for in life is sports. My favorite one was volleyball. It taught me a lot about life and myself. My sophomore year I made varsity, but was upset when I sat the bench more than I played. However, I still pushed myself every practice and never gave up hope. This payed off because the next season I was a starter and a team captain. Being a student athlete has been an incremental part of who I have become in the future. I did not realize it at the time, but my participation in sports has affected my life in more ways than I thought. Consequently, sports have had a major influence on the career path I have chosen, and have also been a significant part of bringing my family together.

I play football here at ULM and we have been in our fall camp for the last 23 days. It is a mental, physical, and emotional strain and tensions are running high. One day early on in camp we were out in the blistering heat practicing. We were almost finished when we called a screen pass and I was going to be the main blocker for the play and if I messed up it wouldn't work. Then as soon as the ball was snapped I stepped with the wrong foot first. This slowed me down and the defender was able to clobber our receiver behind the line of scrimmage. My position coach, Coach Clark, immediately ran over yelling, "What are you doing? Where is the direction you can't lose your man on that play?" I knew what I had done wrong, "I can't let him get up the

It was my sophomore year, and the day had come to find out who made the varsity lacrosse team. We piled into the locker room to discover rows of brand new helmets. The list of the varsity players was written on the whiteboard. The team was excited, the locker room buzzing with noise. My heart dropped as I realized that my name wasn’t written there. My friends were admiring their new helmets and I had to hold back tears and disappointment. I know now that I still had to be developed at the junior varsity level, but it wasn’t easy to understand back then. At practice that day, I played out of pure spite, every move filled with rage. You aren’t good enough, I thought. I left practice that day without saying goodbye to my friends.

Each member on the team shared the same values, emotions, and knowledge of that particular sport. As a freshman and sophomore in high school, I knew that I needed to be on the same level as my other teammates. For me to be accepted in this community, I had to show them my ethos appeals to let them know that I was just like them. Sportsmanship, diligence and perseverance, were the skills needed to show the upperclassmen and my coach that I was serious and that I was ready to be part of the team. The upperclassmen knew that I had it in me; all I had to do was prove that I could do it. Proving to older long time members of the team is not the easiest thing to do. They are cynical about every action you do. In order for me to prove my worth, I had to show an emotional appeal toward the “veterans of the team” which were similar to that of the

In the fall semester of my freshman year in high school I had decided to try out for my school’s drill team, the Crimson Cadettes. This organization has a reputation of very classy, well put together young women and by being on the team, one automatically has extremely high standards that they are expected to meet. Being a Cadette is a big deal because it requires an abundance of hard work and is very time consuming. My teammates and I are often spending our extra time at school whether it be for practice, pep rallies, contests or even more. There are on average about sixty dancers on the team each year and because we spend so much time together, it is expected that sometimes we’ll disagree on some things.

We would always begin our practices with sprints and one long run before we continued with technical drills. Many girls struggled with the endurance aspect of soccer. I would always do my best to finish the run, then immediately head back to the last person running in to finish so that they would not feel singled out during these athletic struggles. I thought of how great our soccer team was going to become. The chemistry seemed just right and to the point where we could see ourselves winning the district tournament at the end of the year. Unfortunately, my dreams of victory came to a halt when I started to see divisions on the team. These divisions started due to one of the seniors talking down to underclassman, especially to one of the most talented girls on the team who became our top scorer. This particular senior became jealous of our top scorer and decided to ban girls together so they wouldn’t assist her in her attempts to score. Thankfully our team’s talent led us to win most of our games, but I could see how much these divisions were hurting us as a team. I decided to talk to my soccer coach about the matter to get his opinion. He reminded of my captain position, and how I am expected try to resolve these situations as well. I concluded that

I didn’t think it was fair for a fifth grader to make varsity when she didn’t put in the effort, simply because her older sister was also on the team . I didn’t find it fair that we were placed on the lowest team and we tried as hard as them if not harder, we were as good as them, if not better, and we came to every single conditioning, practice, and meeting. Yes, I know I was given the option to leave if I felt this way, but I was determined to show them that I deserved to be right along with everyone else. Through tears, practices, games, extra workout sessions, additional batting cage time , and many arguments with my mom over the stress softball was causing me I was moved to freshman. I felt so accomplished, yet still unamused by the fact there were fifth graders dressing varsity. I don’t care to admit if someone is better than me but, they weren’t. Simply because they had siblings on the team or knew a coach personally they were placed on varsity. Fifth graders who came to about one week of conditioning moved up because of unfair circumstances, and in the end it created an unpleasant environment and negative energy over the

As a member of the lacrosse team, I often hear our coach utter many words about the class of the team. At the start of the season, I disregarded these words as drivel, and continued to act the same way. I had always seen myself as a man with class, and would not have given much thought to any wrongdoings I may have had, and played them off. I have since realized that the way in which you act, holds more prevalence on the way you are portrayed as a person, and impacts the way you will get through life.

Ten years ago I saw my first soccer game and up until recently I wanted to be a soccer player ahead of my second passion which is computers. Like most kids, all I ever dreamed of is being a pro athlete. I played soccer all 4 years of High school. I went to the camps and training sessions of many colleges. I even went to the extent of trying out for many professional teams. On March 29th of this year I went to Score Indoor, an indoor soccer arena in Fairburn, to play a small scrimmage game. Something in my head told me that I shouldn’t play but I shrugged it off. 20 minutes into the game I was tackled hard and long story short, I tore my acl. Tearing my acl crippled so many of my plans. In June I had probably the most important tryout of my life. I was going to try out for 3 of the biggest teams in Mexico. At the time I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. All I ever thought about was going pro.

Instead of feeling pressure to conform as a student at the University of Georgia, I have found that being in college has made me value the importance of a higher education more so than I ever had before. During high school, my primary goal was to play well enough to receive a football scholarship. At that time, my focus was not on academics. However, since I've arrived at the University of Georgia, my entire concept of the value of a college degree has slowly changed. Rather than seeing just football in my future, I can now picture myself as a football player with a college degree. Consequently, instead of having a negative impact on my personal growth, college has helped me broaden as a person.

While high school student-athletes invest a lot of time and energy into their sport, the collegiate lifestyle brings a new level of difficulty that many incoming freshmen can find intimidating and overwhelming at first. In addition to being under more pressure to perform on a larger, more competitive stage in front of a more expansive audience, they must also deal with the every day challenges that normal college freshmen face: homesickness, transitioning into a more demanding academic workload, and creating a new social network. College athletes have to have their routines extremely time focused, and make time management essential to their daily lives.

I first started playing volleyball at a very young age. I was in the seventh grade when my volleyball career started. My sister started playing in the seventh grade and I just wanted to follow her footsteps. My seventh grade year was ok because I had just started out and really didn’t know the game. There was A team and a B team, where A team was better than the B team. I tried my best to be on the A-team, but guess where I ended up, on the B team.