3 Years that Created Most of What I Am Right Now

I used to be a C student.

During the three years of junior high school, I was on the girls’ basketball team in Japan. We never lost to nearby schools, and in my second year, the team won the state champion. As you can see, the team was very strong, but that also made it a very hard and strict club to be in. There were hardly any days without practice, and there were strict rules you must follow, such as you have to be a great student, and have to have short hair because long hair might distract you during the game. If you do anything wrong, in the worst case, you will be forced to leave the team. There were more than 10 people besides me planning to join this team in the beginning, but after few weeks of practice, only five (including myself) remained.

As I said, I used to be a C student. Our coach’s biggest belief was “Be a good student before being a good player”. But I always slept or did something else during classes, eventually making my test grades very poor. My homework was often late, and I always annoyed my coaches and teammates. Every time I got demanded to run outside for weeks for my punishment. Even though, I still handed in my homework late for about three more times. I really regret what I had done, and strongly desire to erase this history completely from everyone's mind (I don’t want to redo it even if I could because I don’t want to experience the extremely hard practices again). But I know that these three years were really worth it, because I learned manners that would really help me out there in the world, not just how to play basketball. I learned to never be late in handing in assignments again, and to study hard at school.