3 Game Suspension

High school is most likely the most fun and the most stressful time of your childhood. You are still young and will do crazy things that probably are not the best decisions. For me, high school taught me a lot. Not just about poetry and algebraic solutions, but about myself as well. I have learned how to be a better person and what I want out of life. If you think you won’t make any mistakes in high school, you are so wrong. I have made plenty and probably the toughest repercussion was learning to take responsibility for my actions and handle the consequences. My Junior year was by far my least favorite year, but the only thing I enjoyed from that year was my soccer team. We were crushing it that year, they were my second family. On the night of homecoming most of the starters including me went to a party. My teammate was hosting the party at her house and we were told, “not to tell anyone outside of our friend group about the gathering”. Not only was it during soccer season, but we were also having an amazing season. We didn’t think much of it at the moment, but we definitely should have thought it through before invited a ton of people. Word got around and other people that were not invited showed up with substances that shouldn’t have been there. All I could remember thinking is, “how could we be so irresponsible? How could I be so inconsiderate of my teammates?”

I had just dropped people off at the party and I was about to leave to switch vehicles with my mom. I ended up staying for 30 minutes to hangout with everyone. At that time, there were only close friends there and no substances. After I had switched vehicles with my mom I went back to the party knowing there were more people there with substances. I got a text reading, “more people just showed up and they brought alchohol”. Instead of remaining at home and out of trouble, I showed up at the party and there were cops standing outside the door. I was already there so it wasn’t like I could just leave. Long story short everyone was questioned and sent home. It was originally planned to be a fun night with all my close friends, and it turned bad within an hour. Many athletes were there, including most of our starters on our soccer team. We were all suspended for three games but the worst punishment was the stigma that we all received and the disappointment from our teammates.

We all learned a lesson from this experience that we would remember for a long time. Luckily, the three games we could not play in were not that hard and we had enough faith in our team to pull it off, we still had that reputation. We ended the season with an MVC championship title, but that didn’t make the mistake go away. I took away so much from this experience and learned what it means to be a teammate and a leader on and off the field. Although it might sound fun in the moment, you need to think about the long term consequences. We lost our teammates’ trust, our coaches’ trust and we could have cost our entire team our season if we missed more important games. The most important thing I learned was before making a decision that could potentially be bad, ask myself if it is really worth it.

Photo by JosephGilbert.org on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND