<\/p>\n
Sports taught me to win. As a three-sport varsity athlete my freshman year of high school, I was highly impressionable and susceptible to adopting the qualities, both good and bad, of my teammates and coaches, along with the general sentiments that athletics at an all-boys school embodied. \u201cMen don\u2019t cry,\u201d \u201cSecond makes you the first loser\u201d and the idea of \u201cmanning up\u201d were constantly thrown around by my role models and peers. Being taught that the scoreboard \u2014 or for me, the stopwatch \u2014 revealed everything you needed to know meant that I often failed to listen to people\u2019s stories and centered my life around results rather than progress.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When athletics dictate not just how you behave on the field but also how you view other realms of your life, complications arise. While being taught not to show excitement over beating someone else at the finish line might have taught good sportsmanship within my athletic life, when I tried to shut down emotions toward relationships or ignore my own feelings in other places, I began to feel isolated. Combined with a feeling that qualities like my sensitivity and curiosity \u2014 which I once prided myself on \u2014 mattered less than shaving a second off my final 5K running time or getting a varsity letter as a freshman, I began to try to change parts of myself, ignoring aspects of my identity that were fundamental to who I was then and who I am now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Throughout my freshman year of high school, I perceived any sense of emotion or vulnerability as a liability. Despite seeing some minor improvements in my athletic performance, I was rapidly losing connection with relationships \u2014 an integral part of my identity \u2014 that I had long held so close.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During this time, my dad reminded me that I was learning certain values from the wrong place. Always the first person to ask if he could come to a race \u2014 to which I usually said no \u2014 my dad was and still is an avid supporter of my engagement in athletics. But beyond physically showing up he has directly and indirectly taught me invaluable lessons where sports have been unable to. Upon arriving home on a Saturday after a long day of fretting about a race, drinking six bottles of Gatorade, cheering and finally worrying about what my coach was going to say on the bus home, my dad, before ever asking how I placed, would inquire about how I felt<\/em> about the race. For a while, my responses would begin with either \u201cgood\u201d or \u201cbad,\u201d based primarily on what I would say next: \u201cI got \u2018x\u2019 place.\u201d He pushed further, though. \u201cDo you feel good about your effort<\/em>?\u201d To him, the result mattered much less than how I felt about the result and my performance. This value, this emphasis on the process, has carried into realms of my life beyond just athletics.\u00a0<\/p>\n