The definition of Adversity is having difficulties or misfortune. When I first started my football season this year at SHS, we had our first game the first week of school. As we were getting ready for it and doing all the things we needed to to prepare, our Coach told us one thing. He tells the team this every time we meet as a team the night before our Varsity games. He says no matter what happens, win or lose, you have to overcome adversity. Even though it might be hard to overcome sometimes, you will always have it. So far in my season we are 5-0. But that doesn't mean we haven't had to overcome adversity. As we prepare for games each week we watch film as a team and then the rest of the week we practice the things we see and get better at them each day. Adversity could be as a team or just ourselves.
When we prepare, we fight and get mad at each other during practice but we do it because like my coach says, we care that you get better and learn what you need to so that we can win this week. He also tells us that with opponents comes people coming to him with questions that they hope can be answered like, "Are you guys going to win on Friday?" For me, I have to think to myself and ask: have we had a good week at practice, has everyone done their job for themselves and the team. If I do answer them I usually say, "I think we have a good chance at winning, but we just need to wait and see if we remember what we learned."
I think that fans are one of athletes biggest problems we face each week as they prepare for a new opponent. We practice everyday for a few hours, but we're at school longer. While we're at school we have to focus on our work and then when we're done with school we have to go to practice and just focus on that. When you get a whole bunch of people asking you lots of questions it can get in the way sometimes. You may start thinking that you are the best and that you can beat every team, but you have to forget about all the things around you and just focus on you and how you can help your team out on that Friday night and learn how to get better so that you can win and be the best team. It all comes with hardship and struggle to become the best.
As an athlete, I found a quote by a very popular NFL player named Jason Witten. He says, " I Will Never Quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My team expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than our competition. If knocked down, I will get back up every time. I will draw on every remaining source of strength to help my team and to accomplish our goal. I am never out of the fight."
I also found this quote while writing this. " It is your REACTION to ADVERSITY, not the adversity itself, that DETERMINES how your LIFE'S STORY will develop." - Dieter F. Uchtdorf. I like this quote because adversity in the end comes down only to you and the way you think and knowing you can handle your situation. For me, my REACTION to playing football is the winning or losing a game. And how I can DETERMINE if we win or lose is up to me and how I can strengthen myself and my team to be better each day and every week.
The last quote I found was, "I like criticism. It makes you strong."- Lebron James. My coach was talking to us about this today before we started practice. He was saying that when you make a mistake and you come off the field and we yell in your face and embarrass you in front of everyone, we're doing it to make you better and show you the potential you have as a player and how you can help your team out. He also said it's the only way to show you that you need to work harder and that you can work harder so that the next week you can remember what we said and fix what you need to.
To finish, the adversity I have right now as a player is that I'm a senior and I'm not starting on the Varsity team like I want to. I'm playing down with the JV team. For others, they see it as--maybe he's not as good as those on Varsity. But really it's up to me to show my coaches that I can work hard every play and that as player I need to play the way I know I can be. When I play in a JV game, all of our coaches are there. And when I'm doing my best to help my team out, I want to make sure I keep it up the whole game so that I can help my team win. When I don't do the right thing or miss an important block that could have gotten us a touchdown, I walk off the field not thinking about all the other good plays I had during the series, I think what my coach will say to me to help me get better so that when we go back out on the field I won't make that mistake again. Even though I have mainly talked about adversity in sports, it's not just for that. Everyone faces it at work, school, with friends and even more. We need to learn how to go through and figure out how we can make it better for us first instead of making sure everyone else is okay while you're still trying to overcome it yourself. You can't give up on yourself, because if you do adversity will overtake you. You'll just go through life daily thinking you won't be able to do it even though you really can.
Written by Alex Wheeler
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