Age 14
Fayetteville
 

Have you ever done anything that you thought you, or anyone else, could never accomplish in your lifetime? I sure have. See, I'm not the type of girl that would be good in sports at all. I am the type of girl that talks on the phone and goes shopping all the time, not the sporty kind. Everyone knew that I was like that, too. Since being a girly girl was my reputation, I wanted to do something daring-- try out for the basketball team.  

I've loved basketball for a long time and I always like to watch people play it, but I never thought of me playing it. My brother loves to play basketball with my neighbors, so I thought I could get good if I started to play with them. So over the summer I started to play with them, and they taught me little plays and skills to playing. I got a lot better and by the time school started back, I was ready.

When October rolled up to basketball sign-ups, I started to doubt that I was good enough. All the other girls have been playing for years, and I've only been playing for a summer. Word got around that I had signed up, and people kept coming up to me either asking me if it was true that I was going out for the team, or teasing me with things like "You don't belong on the court" or "You're just a little, white girl, not an athlete." Those comments that people told me made me regret signing up. I kept on telling myself "Come on Sara, you can do it, you don't need them to bring you down." So I finally blocked the mean comments from my mind and kept on believing in myself.

Tryouts came around and I was practicing my heart out. I was ready to make the team. After school all the girls met in the gym for the first day of our two-day tryouts. We all were in the gym when our coach came in. She was a former track star and wanted to become our school's seventh grade basketball coach. We all went into the locker room and changed into shorts and T-shirts, then we had to run around the gym 10 times as part of our warm-ups. Then we had to stretch and do lay-up drills. That was the easy part.

We had to go through endless drills on the football field and then out in the parking lot. It was so cold outside and we were all dying from not being as fit as we thought we were. That was the end of day one.

After school the next day, we did the same thing: met in the gym and did all of our warm-up drills. Then it came to the hard part of the whole tryouts--run around the football field about eight times. All of us started sprinting around the first lap, but then we all gradually started to slow down. By the time lap seven came around, all the girls were too tired to run, so they started to walk. Our coach started to yell at us saying, "I said run, not walk." So we all had to start running, trying to get done as quick as we could. Finally we all got done and we had to go back to the gym for water and then do more drills for the next hour.

When we came to the end of our tryouts, our coach told us that she would put up the list of girls that made the team in the gym the next morning, and that they would have practice that afternoon.

I was so nervous the next morning. When I saw our coach put up the list and then all the girls go over there, I just couldn't move, I was too nervous. All of my friends told me to go over there, and so finally I did. As I was walking over to the list, everyone was staring at me. I went up to the list and my jaw dropped to the floor. I walked back over to where I was sitting and I sat down in amazement. I. Sara Kolman, made the basketball team! I was so happy that the whole day I smiled. That was something that I accomplished in school that nobody (including me) thought I could do.

login to post comments