Life Lessons in Sports

Dylan Kent

WORD COUNT: 301

Sports have always been something very important in life.  I have spent over ten years of my life competitive swimming.  The sport of swimming is incredibly time consuming and both mentally and physically exhausting.  Getting up before 5am to swim and training for over twenty hours a week are just accepted norms in swimming.  While swimming is challenging I have also found that it can be very rewarding and can teach someone important life lessons. 

An example of an important lesson I learned occurred a few summers ago.  It was the last night of my championship competition and I was swimming my best race.  My goal in this race was to qualify for the Canadian Nationals.  I swam faster than I ever had before.  I touched the wall and looked up at the clock only to see that I had missed the qualifying standard by a little under half a second.  I was devastated.  For the entire week that followed all I could think about was what a tremendous failure I was.  It was then, with some help from my coach, that I started to think more constructively on what I could have done to get there.  I made a promise to myself that next year I would qualify.  I reassessed my training and decided I needed to do more than I was currently doing, I needed to work harder.  When swimming started back up again, I put myself back together mentally and was far more driven than before.  I put in every bit of my effort every day.  I used my past failure as motivation to keep pushing myself.  Early in the season I achieved my goal by qualifying for Nationals not just in my best event but also three others. 

            I believe that lessons like learning how to deal with setbacks and goal setting are important values that are can be developed by having a passion for sports. 

BELIEF: I believe that athletics help a person develop key life skills and learn important life lessons that would otherwise difficult to experience.