Personal Narrative: My First Two Years Of High School Basketball

When I was a little kid I would go onto my mom’s computer and I type “ESPN” into the search engine. NBA would pop on the top on the screen and I would click it. NBA is my favorite sport to watch. I would look at the teams that were scheduled to play that night. The thing that always interested me is the over-under of the game and the percent chance of which team that would win the game. The one thing that always confused me was who in the world can the calculate something like that. I always tried asking my dad about it, but it was always too complicated for me to understand. Nothing really in grade school math further explained my yearning for an answer to how people calculate a team’s chances of winning. My first two years of high

school did not cover this subject neither. I was growing impatient.
My interest for stats and percentages all started when I was in second grade. I would used to watch SportsCenter every morning before school, while I ate breakfast. They would present crazy stats for players like “The oldest player to have fifteen assists and zero turnovers” or “third player ever to hit three homeruns on his birthday”. I would always find satisfaction in stuff like that. This encouraged me to go online and find what cool status I could come up with by just looking at athletes stats from current and previous years. I would also check the daily leaders in points, assists, and rebounds for basketball if it was that season or I would check to see who was leading the league in home runs and runs batted in if it was during baseball season and I would also check to see who was leading the NFL in passing touchdowns, passing yards, and rushing touchdowns. This was all part of my daily routine. The one thing though I never looked at was like shooting percentage, batting averages and teams win percentages. I always thought those were pointless numbers.