A Lesson A Simple Game Can Teach

Basketball season was coming around and tryouts for the A-team were a lot of the kids number one priority. It was the first night of tryouts and I knew it was going to be a tough team to make given both seventh and eighth-graders make the team and I was a seventh-grader. I could feel the excitement and nervousness building inside of me as I walked through the gym doors. The tryout began and finished in the snap of a finger. The following day was practically identical to the first day of tryouts and after that I just waited for the call of whether or not I made the team.

“Michael made the team, but he is a bubble player so he would not play much, would he still like to be on the team?” the coach said.

My dad explained this to me and I thought long and hard for that hour and finally decided yes, I want to be on that team.

Weeks past and we were headed to our first ever tournament early one Saturday morning. The following hour and a half is still the most memorable hours of my time on any of my teams in grade school. Halftime had come, and I had yet to step on the court. I started to realize I might have made a terrible decision because at that moment I realized I want to play the game, not watch. With a full season ahead of me this brought tears to my eyes. Towards the end of the third quarter I hear my coach say,

“Michael, you’re in”,

I rose from my seat as excited as one could be, completely disregarding the fact that there was another Michael on the team. That second of excitement past quickly as my coach yelled,

“Michael A, not R”.

I returned to my seat and, minutes later, stumbled towards the bathroom. After quickly reminiscing on my previous thoughts of playing rather than watching, tears came rushing down my smoky face. The idea of quitting came in and out of my head a lot that night. I remember telling my dad everything I was thinking about and he told me that I had to deal with it and I could not quit because I made the decision to join this team.

As I think back to that experience today, I learned so many different things about the game I love, but one thing most importantly: I want to play. I would rather play a lot for a winless team rather than never play on an undefeated team. From that moment on, I played the game much less competitively but had some of the most fun times of my life. This taught me that experiences in the present can really shape your future in such an amazing way, even if the experience was awful at the moment.