Balancing Sports and Music: A Personal Journey

595 Words2 Pages

For nearly my entire life I have been active in both sports and music. From a young age I began playing soccer, football, basketball, baseball, and even competed in track and field. One of my other activities, however, was singing. The problem with this was that in the choir room athletes get very little respect, and on the field singers receive even less respect. My entire life I have faced ridicule and derision in each of these places. No one, whether it be a teammate, a coach, a director, or even my best friends truly understand how difficult it is to traverse through these very different worlds. One of the toughest challenges I’ve had was my freshman year when I participated in our high school’s musical, Children of Eden, and at the same time was a vital member of the freshman basketball team. I only ended up missing two or three basketball practices, but nonetheless, I was put at the end of the bench for the next week all because I chose to sing. During that same week some of my teammates were …show more content…

The week before the show I had a basketball ball game and I knew it would conflict with a dress rehearsal. Once I had mustered up enough courage I went to inform my director that I would be missing the next rehearsal. This didn’t sit too well with him. He pulled me aside and for about ten minutes angrily lectured to me the importance of being at rehearsal and continuously mentioned how stupid it was of me to choose basketball over his musical. I had never been so scared in my entire life, and when I returned to rehearsal the day after my game I was not received too pleasantly by my peers in the show. Being one of five freshman in our fifty person cast was already lonely enough but it only got worse until the show ended. It took until my Junior year to gain respect back from some of those people when I was awarded the lead role of The Beast in Beauty and the

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