I came to tryouts thinking I was ready. The whole day I had a confident mindset and a real positive attitude like I always have. I walked eagerly with butterflies in my stomach to the gym where the tryouts were placed seeing all of the people walking into the gym caused me to become nervous. The gym where we would tryout at wasn’t the main gym it was the second gym, we have two gyms. The main gym is where all the main events are at, like all the games/meets and assemblies, so you could imagine what the second gym was like. It wasn’t as big as the main gym and it wasn’t as designed and decorated as the main gym. I shouldn’t be worried but it’s a lot of competition to go against.

There were already a lot of people there and people still walking through the door. The other freshman was already shooting around to warm themselves up, and you could hear the balls and so I grabbed a ball too. All I could hear the multiple swishes of the ball going into the net as it hit nothing but net, and the thumps off of the rims and of the backboards. When the ball bounces on the ground, it sounded like if you were playing kickball, with one of those red bouncy balls that are like the size of a soccer ball, and you had just kicked it. Imagine that all over the small gym. It almost echoes. Most of their balls were good the one’s that needed some work were the one’s that wasn’t fully pumped up yet. As soon as I grabbed a ball I immediately ran to a rim and immediately noticed how dirty and dusty the gym floor was. I didn’t really worry about it because I didn’t think it will affect me, after all I thought the shoes I was wearing was completely fine.

Now it’s time to officially start tryouts.

Things were going so smoothly, wasn’t worried about a thing. The drills coach had us do was pretty easy, so I wasn’t worried.

Then all of a sudden that all changed.

During one of our drills I fell. It was the start of the drill the drill is called three man weave and basically you had to run, and catch the ball then after you caught the ball you run through the middle onto the side that you passed it to and you keep on doing that until you get down to the rim and make the lay-up, or miss it but you’re supposed to make it. So I was running and as soon as I caught the ball to pass the ball I fell and we didn’t even finish the drill.

Things just started to go downhill from there.

There was another drill that we did were it was a smaller version of the last drill. So instead of passing we just handed it off, but there was a problem I didn’t know how to do it. (For the record I know how to it now).It sounds simple but I couldn’t do it. So I ended skipping the drill and watching from the sidelines.

Overall even though I made some mistakes I thought I was enough to make the team.

I got cut.