“Don’t give up, Don’t ever give up”

Tonight was the last night of regular season play for intramural broomball. This is my first season playing and it has been quite a ride. Some of my friends and myself decided that it would be an exciting and new experience to play broomball because it is something that none of us had ever tried before. We got a team together and all us playing are athletic and have had experience playing many different sports. Yet broomball is unlike any sport any of us had ever played before. Trying to play a game very similar to hockey on ice while wearing sneakers is a lot harder than I originally thought it would be. It is extremely hard for me to get traction under my feet and the first game we played back in January was extremely frustrating for me. I was falling every other minute and every time someone passed the ball to me I would fall too. But as the season went on I found myself becoming more and more comfortable with being on the ice and using the broomball sticks. If someone asked me after the first game if I like the game of broomball, my immediate answer would have been “No, I hate it”. This was most likely because I was not very good and get discouraged when I do not succeed. But I stuck with it and I personally feel that although I am still not the strongest player, I have improved tremendously and each time I play I am growing to love the sport more and more. Everyone looks ridiculous when they fall so I needed to realize that I was being too hard on myself. It is impossible to excel in something the first time you do it and thus it is important to never give up. This statement about sticking with it can be applied to my own life in another way as well. I know that I will face many obstacles in my teaching career and I know that it will be important to keep my head up and never give up on something I feel so passionate about. My varsity soccer coach in high school used to have a single phrase that he so passionately believed in and would say too us many times each day- “Don’t give up, Don’t ever give up”. This is a short yet powerful line that I try to live my life by.