Jon Hocking
English 101
2/28/12
Memoir
As long as I can remember sports have been very important to me. It all started when I turned 7 and my dad introduced into tee-ball. After 1 season of tee-ball I really didn’t want to play any more sports. My parents knew that it was good for me to play so they wanted me to play more sports. The next year my dad got me playing basketball, soccer, and baseball. Even though I didn’t like any of these sports but I continued to play them until I got to middle school. As much as I didn’t enjoy these sports like I wanted to it was still a great experience. After years of trying different sports I finally found I sport that I loved to play. This sport was football and the only reason why I played was because my mother made me play. Was I the best player on the field? Absolutely not, actually I was one of the smallest kids on the team. This only made me want to become bigger and better at football and was one the best motivators.
When I got to high school the sports I played were football for 3 years, winter/spring track for 3 years, and lacrosse, cross-country, and powerlifting for 1 year. I didn’t play football my freshman year because I thought I was too small and wouldn’t play. I realized that being small was only the start of my problems. The hardest of high school was managing sports, school, and my home life. For the most part I played a sport every season with only a 2 week break between each sport. High school was a huge step up from middle school and I learned that very fast. When I used to get home from practice I wouldn’t have the energy to study or do homework. This made it almost impossible to get all my school work done. I knew that in order to be able to keep playing sports I wouldn’t be able to let myself get behind in my school work. To do this I would need to come up with a plan to manage my time.
The most important thing I learned in high school was dealing with sports, home life and school. I learned a lot about how to manage my time so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed with everything. Playing sports in high school made it a lot easier dealing with college and working at the same time because I was used to managing my time. Everyone says college can be so stressful but I felt almost relieved switching from high school to college because I have more time for school.
The second most important thing that sports taught me was self-discipline. I believe sports help you improve your self-discipline because practices are full of things that you don’t want to do. Even though you don’t always have a coach telling you what to do, sports still build self-discipline because they put you in the state of mind where it doesn’t matter that you don’t want to do something. Instead it makes you realize that in order to be successful you are going to have to do things that you hate.
Even though I love sports and they have taught me a lot I knew that college, sports, and work would be way too much to handle. I would love to play a sport next year when I go to a 4 year school but if I don’t I will still always remember what sports taught me. If I want something bad enough I can accomplish it by working as hard as I can to get it.
Your essay was very good. It kept me interested in reading it. One part that really engaged me was when you said, "how your mother made you play", and you threw in a question. Also how you described that,"you were the smallest kid on the team." The essay is also organized. There are some suggestions and a question I have about your essay. Maybe in the second paragraph you should use the third sentence for the first sentence so your not repeating what you already said. One question I have is in the third paragraph do you mean you loved watching sports? The one thought I have is, I can see this essay going in two different directions. One is how high school prepared you for college. The other one is how watching sports inspired and encouraged you to play sports.
ReplyDeleteThis certainly fits your theme, but I agree with Jessica that this seems to be going in several different directions. Writing about your whole history with sports is too broad, I think. I'd encourage you to focus on a particular experience. This seems to be a resonant line: "The benefits I gained dealing with sports, home life and school work were self-discipline, gaining more confidence, teamwork, sportsmanship, exercise and stress reliever. " That's quite a mouthful, though. Can you pick one of these and *show* how your learned it through your high school sports career? (The Daytona thing doesn't seem too promising to me--exciting for a kid to travel to Florida, but not necessarily a rich experience to write about.) If there's some other point you want to make, feel free to take this in a different direction, but it seems as if the central thing here is the struggle to balance sports, home, and school. How did you learn that (or did you)? Did you learn anything from how difficult that was, or anything about yourself? (What were the satisfactions of sports that made it worthwhile in some way?)
DeleteRemember that your goal in a memoir is to bring the reader *into* your experience, and you need to do that through details, through describing specific scenes and experiences. right now this is awfully general, an overview. Can you bring us down into the struggles of a high school athlete and then show how you managed to create a game plan(and was it successful)?
In terms of usage/grammar this is pretty clean!!