The palms of my hands began to sweat rapidly as I sat in seventh period waiting anxiously for the bell to ring. Tryouts for basketball had yet to begin and already I was feeling like a nervous wreck. Perhaps I wouldn't have felt this way had I had experience in playing. Don't get me wrong: I loved the game of basketball, but I enjoyed watching rather than playing. I had foolishly allowed my cousin, who had played basketball throughout her youthful years, talk me into trying out for the Junior Varsity team. As time was slowly passing, I began to have second thoughts. I didn't want to go out there and make a fool of myself. On the other hand, I didn't want to be labeled as a quitter. "Ring, Ring, Ring," the bell rung and off to tryouts I went.
When I arrived at the gym, the coaches greeted me with a warm welcome. After everyone was present, we all ran five laps around the gym to warm up. Once we were finished with that, the coaches sat us down and informed us about the skills and drills that we were going to be performing throughout the whole week of tryouts. Once they were done lecturing, we started to work on the fundamentals of basketball: passing, dribbling, defense, and so on. Most of these drills required us to partner up; so of course I chose my cousin. This made it easy for me, because she knew what the heck she was doing and she was good at doing it! .
The passing came quite easy for me, but it was the dribbling that troubled me. On one particular drill, we had to place one hand behind our back while we dribbled the ball with the other hand. The tricky part to this was that we had to dribble through cones and other obstacles. I would constantly loose the ball or knock over a cone. There were even times when I caused the person next to me to fumble the ball. I am glad to say that I wasn't the only one to cause chaos. The coaches continued to encourage us on. .
On the second, third and fourth days of tryouts, we basically reviewed what we had covered on the first and then more.
