The thrill of making a team at the high school level is a feeling that will be remembered forever for most high school kids. Sadly, there also must be an opposite outcome: getting cut.  This can be devastating, particularly when you have the most confidence making the team.  Nearly everyone will experience this type of rejection at some point in their lives, yet this feeling makes many student-athletes feel like they failed, and send them into a period of in which they question themselves and everything they did during tryouts.  But is there something athletes can learn from getting cut?

Unfortunately, the feeling of getting cut from a sports team is all-too familiar for me.  I was cut from the baseball team my sophomore year and I can still vividly remember the disappointment and embarrassment. I was shocked when I found out because I went into the tryouts fulling expecting I would be on the team.  That expectation made the experience all the more difficult.

The biggest emotion I remember feeling was being disappointed in myself. I was extremely mad at myself because I remembered how my dad had instructed me to begin preparing for the season and to try to get more practice in before the season started it. When looking back it makes sense why I did not make the team because I never really gave the effort that I was supposed to and that is something I will always regret. This was a big life lesson to me because it made me realize if I plan on playing a sport in high school it is not something, I can go into without putting maximum effort into it. Although I do not enjoy the fact that I got cut, I will be glad that I was able to gain great knowledge of what it means to prepare and not slack off when coming into a sport.

The second major emotion I felt was an embarrassment because of the way I saw the team and how I thought it would extremely easy to make the team. This was a slap in a face to my idea that I was good enough to make any team I wanted even with minimal effort but now I understand any sport at Chaminade must be given the most effort as possible.

Like many high schoolers, it is often thought that because you might think you are at a certain skill level you don’t have to put maximum effort. I even talked to classmate Jacob Telscher who talked about his experience being cut from soccer, “It is just really something that let me down because I was wanting to make a team.” We both agreed on how it was just something that changes your expectations in life and how we both were bettered for it because it taught us that we must dedicate our maximum effort whenever we are trying to make a team.

I think in final what I can learn from this experience is to not expect many things given to you and when you are trying to make a team to never make assumptions as to whether you will be on the team or not.