Personal Narrative: Life After Football

The first swim team I joined was a local private pool team, five minutes from my house. After the first week of practice, I was hooked. My first season I made many friends and learned I was not an awful swimmer. The next year I grew bigger and stronger, and became better at the sport. In summer swimming, there are three championship meets, Divisionals, All-stars, and Mid-Caps. As a five year old, in my second year of swimming, I made it to Mid-Caps, in a relay. I did not medal that year, but it taught me that I had to keep working vigorously to achieve my goal. My goal was achieved when I was eight, when I achieved first place in the twenty-five backstroke. As I progressed to higher levels of swimming, including high school, I experienced the true meaning about swimming.

Along with working hard to make the team I wanted to be on most, once I was on the team, I learned that I can’t always control everything. Being knocked down through the seasons, I have less desire to continue playing. “Tough love” would be an understatement on how some of the coaches have treated fellow athletes and I. Never earning a “nice work” or “good job” begins to get frustrating and you get harder on yourself as an athlete. These challenges have grown me as a person and taught me that I shouldn’t give up, no matter how hard it

The next year I practiced a lot. I still wasn’t very good, but our team all together was good. We got 1st in our league.

This wasn’t just your typical football practice before your first game, this was trying to get everyone hyped after a rather laid back Monday practice. This was a more competitive practice than usual, trying to get everyone motivated for the first game against Clarksburg. Coach Song thought it would be a good a time to divide everyone up into teams, Team Zuckerman and Team Johnson. The teams were named after our running back and myself, who were voted team captains. In between drills we would have little competitions between both teams to try to bring a competitive edge for everyone to get excited for practice. Emotions were at an all-time high because Coach Song had yelled at us after the first practice to get us excited to on

At the ripe age of 18, it was my last year swimming. Sadly, it was also my first. The idea to start swimming came from my boyfriend, who had been doing it his whole life. He thought it would allow us to have more quality time together. Even though I started swimming to spend time with him, I grew to really enjoy the sport and I wanted to get better and better each time I hit the water. I ended up getting really good really quickly because the sport came so natural to me. Although it was my first year, I was already competing in the City Meet, and I wanted to do my best because I knew that it would be my last chance to race.

While everyone else treaded and paddled in the water, I was sent home because I was screaming uncontrollably, holding onto dear life nearly ripping the skin off my swimming instructor. I have never liked being in water. I never went near it. I was even scared of standing on the wooden planks at Pier 39. I was embarrassed when my mother signed me up for swimming lessons again when I was in 8th grade. I was the oldest and the tallest student in the entire group, but I was eager to learn. I took a deep breath and submerged myself into the chlorine-filled water. After three months, I was able to dive and swim in freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly

1) After several workouts, I noticed a big in improvement in my cardiovascular capacity. I was able to do more laps within the 30 minutes. I also noticed that my body adapted to water to the fact that I had to swim more often, therefore I was less tired at the end of my workouts compared to the first time I did the workout. Additionally, I improved my swimming skills because it had been a while I did not swim, so I had to practice some movements and it helped me a lot to complete my laps faster.

This paper begins with my own existing knowledge of swimming, followed by questions that I wanted to find out in my research that were answered in my paper. It then gets into my research and what I found out while conducting my senior paper. After that is

I wanted to be out there playing with my friends and enjoying the benefits of victory, however I just wrestled with that feeling of not being good enough. When I experienced that feeling, I learned that there were really just two ways to deal with it. Either you overcome it or you let it destroy you. I chose to overcome. I chose to make something of myself and not to give up on something I loved.

Okay, picture this it’s the beginning of summer, it was a little before eight a.m and I had just arrived at my first swim club practice at the pool. It was my first year and I had no idea what I was doing and I was a little nervous.

I took a quick shower and did an enormous cannonball into the pool and when I was swimming I seen a new dive and so then I tried it out and I did it perfect for the first try.

“Take your mark, set, go!” Instead of diving swiftly into the pool and making no noise, I belly flopped so hard that I splashed the other swimmers on my side. Embarrassed and physically hurt, I couldn't stop because I had a race to complete and a time to beat. Kicking as fast as I could and breathing after every stroke, I swam my heart out. Even though I was the last person to touch the wall, I was satisfied because I had just beat my personal record.

13 years. It has been 13 years since I first plunged into the pool to begin my first lesson. I was small, skinny, and shy at the time, not willing to talk to people. I had tried other sports; baseball, soccer, basketball, but I found those to difficult. My dad first brought me to a pool, to splash around in the play area. But I soon found myself wanting to go the deeper parts where the whirlpool and the lazy river were. So I began group lessons on the basics on how to swim, most of the other participants were older than me so I did not make conversation with them. After I finished a couple of lessons and learned how to swim the most basic two strokes; freestyle and breaststroke, I joined a summer team, the Bradley Farm Wave. I was not very

I was ten when I first entered into a major Swimming competition, a stepping-stone towards achieving my dreams. Hours were poured into training and sacrifices made simply for a perfect race to the podium. I had arrived 3 hours earlier, and to my dismay that the competition had been delayed. My parents hid their apparent annoyance, in hope that the long wait would prove its worth, yet only to find out it actually was not. The long wait took its toil on me and panic overcame me at the starting blocks. In a field of 8 swimmers, the number ‘8’ flashed brightly against my name, glistening tears welled up in my eyes as failure washed over me.

“Get up now.” My mom yelled down the hallway “Hurry or you’ll be late!” My brother and I dreaded waking up early to swim, but we had chosen to commit. Even though I’ve competed every year since first grade, swimming still didn’t get any easier. That summer swimming had taught me how to have stamina, the ability to not quit even though it was .