Failure: The Junior Varsity Football Team

Failure does not stop me At one point in my life, I experienced true failure. It was the summer before my freshman year in high school, I tried out for the Junior Varsity football team for the first time. Despite not missing any practices, saying and believing that I wanted to make the team more than anyone, my coach told me I was too small and could not protect myself against the other players on the field. I lost my jersey. That symbolically stood as a sign for my hope and materialized desire. At that point I made a dramatic shift in mentality. While failure is painful, there are many lessons to learn from it: Therefore that failure made me stronger than I would have been had I succeeded. When I was rejected from playing, I felt sad, disappointed and embarrassed. I was sad and disappointed, because I really desired being on the team and I visualized myself making the team and making plays on the field. Many people knew of my aspiration to play, and some of those people told me I would not make it on the team. It was embarrassing that the doubters were proven right, even after it seemed inevitable that I would succeed. Thinking of the negatives led me to

I was motivated, and I learned the meaning of work ethic. The new mentality I acquired carried on to my actions. I began working out in the gym harder, often doing reps until muscle fatigue. I also studied important concepts to know on the football field. The labor intensive routine finally paid off after nearly twelve months, when I gained thirty pounds of muscle, increased my speed by running varsity track as a freshman and obtained a greater knowledge of the game. I also maintained my grades and earned my first Virginia High School League Academic Excellence Award. All while volunteering over two hundred hours as a Visitor-Experience specialist at Nauticus, which is a maritime museum. Finally, I succeeded by making the football team as a