Its a Way of Life

Learning the fundamentals of any game is needed in order to be a decent player. If you play softball you need to know how to catch the ball and throw the ball. Not knowing how to do that will really slow down your game, its almost impossible to play without knowing the fundamentals. If you play basketball you need to know how to dribble, pass, shoot, and you need to know the rules of the game. Every single sport is the same whether it is golf, football, softball, basketball, baseball, tennis, track, volleyball, swimming, or wrestling.

I was thinking about "learning the fundamentals." It made me think about having a job. If you don't know the basic things about the job like how to type, how to answer the phone, or how to file papers, your job is going to be a lot harder than it really should be. Knowing the fundamentals about anything is just a way of life.

Really good athletes shouldn't look at practicing fundamentals as being boring, they should think positive and say that they are making their skills better. Working on fundamentals can never hurt you, it can only make your "game" better. Of course some people are just born with talent and it seems as if they are good at everything but without learning the correct fundamentals then that player will never be as good as they have the potential to be. Hard work + fundamentals = high potential.

"Perhaps the single most important element in mastering the techniques and tactics of racing is experience. But once you have the fundamentals, acquiring the experience is a matter of time."
~Greg LeMond~

Attitude is EVERYTHING!

I feel like it is hard to have a positive attitude about everything in life. I don't know if you feel the same way but I find it very difficult. Keeping a positive attitude in sports, school, work, with friends, with family and many other things can be a hard task for many people. I'm one of those people. Let me give an example... Your playing in a basketball game and the score is 87-20 (your on the losing team). How do most players react to this? The majority of the players get their heads down and it is hard for their confidence to get very high. Parents say, "Don't look at the scoreboard just work on the things you need to work on to make your team stronger." For me it is IMPOSSIBLE to not look at the scoreboard. I'm always wanting to know how many minutes are left, how many points we need to make to tie it up, or even the number of fouls the other team has. I'll admit, I'm not a very positive person and I hate that about myself... Somehow I always manage to find something negative about a situation, I know thats really bad but I can't help it.

I'm very lucky because I have a best friend that knows exactly what to say to keep me positive about everything. Not just in sports but about life too. If it wasn't for her I don't know if I would be doing very well this basketball season. I read this article the other day and it really surprised me but it made a lot of sense. It said that most sport psychologists agree that attitude plays a major role in the establishment of long and short-term goals. The more positive the athlete's attitude, the more likely he or she is of achieving these goals. The more negative the attitude, the less likely he or she is of achieving these goals. Reading that article made me want to stay positive all the time because when I achieve personal goals that I set for myself it makes me feel really good.

If your job is to be a cashier and you don't have a positive attitude towards the customers, your boss will be hearing about it shortly. Keeping a positive attitude in school can push you through the day. Keeping a positive attitude with friends and family will get more people to like you and in the end being positive benefits everyone... Not just yourself. So now my goal in life is to be as positive as I can about everything.

"Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference."
- Winston Churchill-

Winning and Losing

I've heard many people say, "Winning is everything." But really is winning EVERYTHING? Honestly I don't think so because you can learn so many things from losing. Of course no one likes to lose, but nobody is perfect and can win all the time. I'll admit that I'm a sore loser, I absolutely HATE losing. After losing a game I'm not in a very good mood and I'll take out my anger on anyone who tries talking to me. But on the other hand I also feel like I get something out of losing. It shows me what our team needs to work on as a whole and what I need to work on individually. If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment.

Too bad things can't be how they used to be when we were 5 years old. We would play t-ball but no one kept score we just played for the fun of it. Even in parks and recreation we played because we loved hanging out with our friends and playing a sport that we fell in love with. Ever since I was about 6 years old or even younger, basketball became my favorite sport. I would carry my basketball with me everywhere I went. I played every single day that I could and then my dream was that I wanted to play basketball in college and if I could go even farther than college I would. This dream started to fade away once my sophomore year in high school came. Let me cut the story short... We didn't win too many games and like I said before, I HATE LOSING! So after each loss, my love for the game kept decreasing and decreasing. Now I'm in the middle of my Junior year and I don't even like playing basketball anymore because of all the losing.

I also play softball and we have a very good team. Softball in La Junta is very well known and it is like a habit for us to go to state every year. We love to win and when you win, your love for the game increases. I started off playing softball just because it was pretty fun but I never thought about playing after high school. Winning never gets old for me and because we win in softball I love the sport so much! It's hard to say if winning is everything because in life your always trying to win. You want to beat another person out for a job or you want to win the lottery. People have a lot more fun when they win but there can never be 2 winners in the same game. One team gets the win, one team gets the loss... You can learn from both winning and losing.

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
~Michael Jordan~

The Best Person For The Job

I was thinking about this summer when I had a job and I started to compare it to playing sports. I found out that sports are a lot like jobs. When you are trying to get a job, the owner/person who is looking for someone to work for them wants the best person for the job. I'm pretty sure they aren't looking to hire a lazy bum that doesn't even want to be at work. When playing sports the coach wants to have his best players out on the field or on the court. He/she wants to have players in that are going to get the job done and do what is asked of them. A coach is pretty much like your boss for your job. You have to work your hardest when on the field or court and if you don't it's pretty obvious who will be sitting the bench. This is like when you're working, lets say your job is to clean houses. If you don't dust everything or vacuum all the rooms then it's obvious who is going to get fired.

Having the right work ethic is the key. The definition of work ethic is: a set of values based on the moral virtues of hard work and diligence. If one person can clean a house in 1 hour and another person clean the same house in 2 hours and the same quality of work is done then more than likely the individual who cleaned the house at a faster pace will be the one keeping the job. It's the same exact way in sports... In a softball game 2 people can have the same exact hit but the one who is running their hardest around the bases will be the one getting the reward in the end. Having the right work ethic benefits a lot of people, but most of all yourself. If you can tell yourself after a game that you left it all out on the field then you can't regret anything you did. At the end of the day after working and you remember slacking off a little bit here and there you are only cheating yourself.

"The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."
~Attributed to both Vidal Sassoon and Donald Kendall~

Walking Away

In life you are going to make many decisions. And it's not just adults that make decisions, everyone starts when they are very young. It may not be the biggest decision of your life but in the future everybody has to make those right choices. Choices like do i want to go to college or not? I think sports can keep a lot of kids out of trouble. In middle school one of my friends played basketball with me and yes she was kind of a trouble maker, but she was a good kid. The next year they cut her from the team and guess what? She ended up getting pregnant and dropped out of school. Just think what kind of future she could have had if only she made the team that year.

When your really busy you don't have time to get mixed in with the wrong group of people or start using drugs or cutting class. It's really easy to give into peer pressure to your so called "friends." You have to make up your mind and say if I want to be successful then I'm going to have to start taking the right path. When your "friends" ask you to cut class or go do drugs this won't be a problem because when those kinds of things come in your way you will walk away.

There has been many times while in sports that my friends have asked me to do something I don't want to do. I've already told myself that nobody can make me do something that I don't feel comfortable doing. If my friends look at me different just because I don't do drugs and I don't drink then they can. I'm in control of my destiny and I don't want to end up being a nobody. I know that if i start going down the wrong path in life then all my dreams of playing sports in college will be going down the drain. All you have to do is stand up for what you believe is right and who knows maybe you will be setting an example for some people.

"Sports do not build character. They reveal it."

Introduction

Okay so i know that not everyone plays sports, but I know a lot of people that do. I play both softball and basketball and no matter what sport I'm playing I always learn something. Surprising or not the things I learn help me out in every day life. There are many things that you can learn from by participating in sports such as; learning how to deal with pressure, setting goals, meeting challenges, learning how to handle with both a win and a loss, wise decision making and self-motivation. I think having the right attitude towards anything is the key to success. I think it should be easy to share the life lessons that i learn each day and relate them to sports and to life in general.

"Play like you're in first, but train like you're in second." ---Unknown