Tina
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships” My parents left for work in the morning, leaving me home alone all day. Nothing unusual, just a normal day of summer. With the time I spent alone I quickly learned how to provide for myself and to take responsibility for the house chores. I felt really bad for my parents even at a young age. I always knew we were struggling financially.
This caused me to become extremely hyper independent. I never bothered to ask my parents for help with anything because it felt like a burden knowing how busy they were. This affected my social life a lot as a kid since I believed there was no point in making friends because they wouldn’t benefit me. I was never bullied or anything like that. I was just always left to the side because I never really wanted to participate in any social events or do any clubs or sports. This all changed once high school started, I knew that once I got into high school I’d have to actually start trying in school to be able to become successful. This is when I joined my first ever sport, cross country. I chose to join this sport purposely believing this sport wasn’t a team based sport. But I later learned that sportsmanship was extremely important. At practice I would just stay by myself, doing this made it really hard to continuously come back to practice. But then one of my teammates came up and talked to me. We had a pretty normal conversation but as time passed our friendship grew. She made it easier for me to want to continue coming to practice. I started to love cross country and see it has an opportunity to make friends and keep my health in check.
As practices passed by I started talking to my teammates more often. We all cheered on for each other and pushed each other to continue pushing towards a new PR or better times in general. If I’m really honest I wasn’t extremely good at cross country, so I had little to no talent within the sport. But with my team’s support I slowly started getting better and better. I still know there were things for me to improve but I truly believe that some improvement no matter how small it is, is still improvement. Working hard, and building my own support system felt awesome. After picking up cross country I realized how much I loved running. This led me to consider the track team for my school, and also led me to look into a bunch of other sports. Not only sports but I started looking for new opportunities that would help lead me to where I wanna be in the future.
A Bridge for Kids is a prime example of this, I would have never joined A Bridge for Kids or even knew about it unless I started making friends. I found out about this sponsor through a friend and also got recommended for this by that friend. Being able to network like this and find new opportunities makes me feel so secure about my future. I know that I will continue to create new friendships, and pave new opportunities for myself by using the resources I have around me, like this sponsorship. With this money I’d receive I would use it to invest into myself. Buying things that would benefit my extracurricular activities such as sports attire or sports equipment. I know that I will get far, but it takes discipline and work to get there. But with the help of friends and family the hard work feels a tad bit easier to do. Like I said in the beginning,
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”