Personal Essay: Growing Up As A Sport In My Life

Being involved in a team sport during your school years has many great ways of building strong character. Building a student’s character can be done by being on a sports team because the students can learn about sportsmanship, are able to occupy their time in a more constructive way, and it gives students more motivation to maintain good grades.

When I tell people I am from Phoenix, Arizona, they look at me funny and ask, “What are you doing in Connecticut?” My response is always the same, “I’m on the UConn women’s basketball team.” Sport has played a large role in my life and has definitely impacted me. My parents were key factors that helped me get to where I am now. Both of my parents were college athletes. My father played basketball at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Before that, he was an all-state basketball player, tennis player and pitched for his high school baseball team. My mother played tennis at Marquette University. She was voted most valuable player all four years and won the prestigious McCahill Award as the university’s top student-athlete her senior year. She came from a tennis family. Her two sisters, her dad, and several uncles played college tennis. Her father, like her, won the McCahill award as Marquette’s top student-athlete. To this day, they are the only father-child combination to win the award. My parents met in line for drug testing when they were both athletes at Marquette. With parents so into athletics, it is not surprising that they decided early on in their relationship that their children would play sports. They decided my brother and I would participate in sports at a young age and knew that sports would teach us valuable life lessons.

Growing up my whole life, I played every sport imaginable from hockey and soccer to football and tennis. My parents made me start being active and playing sports at a very young age and it was one of the best decisions that they could have made. Sports have so many benefits and teach so many life lessons besides simply the physical and competitive aspects to the game.When I first started playing sports, I absolutely dreaded every aspect of it, from waking up early, to working out, to being sore and tired all of the time. But as I grew older and started to understand life better, I started thinking about my future and the keys to being successful in life. I realized that sports teach so many life lessons beyond the

basketball, soccer, and tennis. I loved each and every one of these sports in a

I never liked playing with dolls, painting nails, pretending I was a teacher or even acting like I was baking with fake food. All that girly stuff sounded boring to me, so the one thing that kept me busy everyday was going outside and playing whatever sport was on for that day with all my neighborhood friends. We played everything from kickball to football in the streets. Ever since I was a little child, playing sports was my passion. In my free time I played every sport you can think of, but sports that I actually was on a team for was baseball, hockey, soccer, and I ran track. Being an athlete is how people knew me, I guess you could say I was and still am a tomboy. Being involved in a sport ever since I was four years old, has really taught me a lot about not just playing the sports itself, but at life as a whole. Being apart of a team, can teach someone many skills, and life lessons. Because there are uncountable reasons why one should be involved in a sport, the main skills, and lessons include learning how to work together, and developing communication, and organizing skills. Additionally, one could develop a good work ethic, and learn how to control body language/temper.

Throughout my high school career, I have challenged the pervasive idea that athletics come first in a student’s life during high school. In my community, football is seen as the pinnacle of a student’s senior year if they play. In my class, many people prefer to blow off homework assignments in favor of going to sleep after practice. However, my actions clearly display that I have challenged this standard and have placed priority on being a STUDENT-athlete. My football and wrestling seasons over the past four years have encompassed many long, exhausting practices and competitions. I, like every individual participant, was faced with the choice to go home afterwards and rest, or to study and strive to further their education. As I am

The pressure of youth sports can be viewed in several different ways. Some of the pressure can be good for the kids, but in the end, it ends up to be too much for the kids to handle. The youth athletes get treated like they are playing higher level sports, rather than being treated like the age they actually are. Adults become more involved than the kids. In some cases, the parents can become violent. In some of the worse outcomes, the intensity of youth sports can lead to death or major injuries. Kids can become very damaged due to the pressure and competitiveness from youth sports.

I interviewed two different families that both have their children actively involved in sports. I interview a family from my home town, all three of their children play competitive minor hockey and they also play summer soccer. The other family I interviewed was a family from Wisconsin, the children in this family were involved with all sorts of sports, from running, football, softball to basketball. Despite the different sports they played and despite the geographical difference I was surprised how similar my interviews went. Both sets of parents said that they enjoyed watching their child play sports. They thought that playing on a team would teach and prepare them for other things in life and teach them what it means to be part of a team.

Yards became smaller as country gave way to the edge of town. We were forced to skirt slightly larger groups of zombies by darting through backyards and leaping fences. I was amazed at how easily I was able to conquer these obstacles. The past few months were like boot camp. My muscles had atrophied due to an easy life as a college professor, but a few months of living on the run had turned a once lethargic human being into a first class athlete.

There is no better feeling than winning a big game, having a fun practice, and playing a sport you love with your friends. Especially when you are at a young age and no matter the outcome of the event, you are always having fun. As you grow up, the sport or sports that you are involved in start to get more competitive. Along with more competition come more practices, more time, and more money. Growing into sports as you age is one of the best parts of childhood, because you start to become closer with the friends you’ve made, and you become more skilled. But what if parents enroll their children into a sport that the kid does not enjoy? Are they only in that sport because the mother or father of that child played that sport when they were young?

Sports participation has prepared me for the future by making me stronger physically and mentally. Throughout my many days as a high school athlete I came across many hardships, coaches, losses, wins, and much more. The hardships were very unwanted, but they made me stronger mentally by learning to cope with criticism. I will have to encounter criticism in my everyday life as an adult, and experiencing it early in life makes it easier and less severe for the future. I have had many wins and been a part of countless exciting victories, this gave me happiness and hope for the future. Next, losses and defeat is a hard thing to accept, but I believe it shows me that the forthcoming will have difficulties that I must be able to bear. It has taught

Children should participate in sports because they will gain incredible social skills such as working cooperatively with others by interacting with kids their age other people besides family. When a child starts spending time with other adults such as coaches rather than their parents, there will be an increase in social skills which will help the child later in life. Learning social skills at such a young age is great because as the child becomes older they will have many opportunities to perfect their social skills. Most employers look for people with great social skills so being able to perfect social skills during an entire childhood would help the child gain employment in the future. The more children who play sports and gain these social

Through my involvement in sports, I have grown a great deal as an individual. I joined my school’s Track and Field Team via an E-mail. For the beginning of my freshman season, I was incredibly shy and received. I probably wrote more words in that E-mail than I said to my coach for the first month of that season. Before Track and Cross, I was not an athlete, and I had never run more than a mile a day in my life. Obviously, I did not go from a couch potato to a track star overnight. I started Track as the slowest girl on the distance team and for the majority of meets that season, I was embarrassed about how slow I was. It was not until nearly the end of the season that I realized that I had nothing to be embarrassed about. Even though I was not fast, no one could deny that I was working my hardest and giving every day whether it was a workout or a race, everything that I had to give. I am not sure when exactly it happened, but soon after, I was no longer the slowest girl on my team. At the Banquet to celebrate the end of the

Lacrosse. My sport. My passion. My game. It isn’t 10 people on a field it is 10 people who are engaged in the game. It isn’t people just wearing helmets and padding it is people who show their passion for the game. My belief is lacrosse.

Being in an American school begins a student’s search to find who they are considered in the system. From a nerd to a punk, many academic ties are also involved with this identity. The one group of students who get the most academic ties with his or her extra-curricular activity is the “jock”. As having the title as a jock, a child learns that many people look at someone who plays football or basketball doesn’t have the ability to learn as fast or as well as someone who just studies and doesn’t have extra-curricular activities. Studying this topic is not as stressed as it should be, even when many programs claim to get more physical activity in students. The articles that have been reviewed were testing whether the athlete gets good grades