I'm Bringing MY FINISHED TEXAS TECH ESSAY Back...

FINISHED!!! Horatio, and some well-placed basketball quotes, and Alex helped me ;-) Thanks

Coach Bobby Knight once said, “You don't play against opponents. You play against the game of basketball.” I do not only believe this to be true in the game of basketball; I feel that this holds true in the game of life. To me, my life and basketball have a lot of similarities. My teammates and coaches are my family and friends. My parents are my head coaches: they taught me the fundamentals of the game and I am still learning things from them, and they are a major support system. My friends are my teammates: they are whom I play the game with, and my team is constantly acquiring new players and, unfortunately, losing others. All the players have their own special skills and talents. For me, those are singing, acting, and photography. Earlier this year, I had a hard time figuring out how I fit into this game. In the words of Scottie Pippen, “Sometimes a player’s greatest challenge is coming to grips with his role on the team.” All players go through it at one point or another. It could be brought on by a new acquisition or, as in my case, being signed by a new team. I had a really hard time adjusting to SMU, and when push came to shove, I decided to leave. Not because I had a conflict with a fellow player, but because my heart was no longer in the game; a thing that is necessary to play well. Because I was not all in the game, I was losing. So I took the advice of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: “I try to do the right thing at the right time. They may just be little things, but usually they make the difference between winning and losing.” I figured out that SMU was not the right thing for me, at least not now. I needed a change of scenery and a place where I could focus. “Basketball is like photography,” Dan Frisby once said, “If you don’t focus, all you have is the negative.” As an award-winning photographer myself, I took to heart what he was saying. I needed to focus, but what did I want to focus on? There was my singing and acting, my photography, my love of travel, my love of law sparked by shows such as Law and Order. It was not until I was sitting in the American Airlines Center watching the Dallas Mavericks play the Memphis Grizzlies that my fog finally cleared and it all came into focus: I wanted to work behind the scenes for a sports team. I come from a sports family (my grandfather played for the New York Giants and was a talent scout for several pro teams and my father had gone to college on a basketball scholarship), I had grown up around sports, some of my favorite memories had come from managing my school’s women’s basketball and men’s lacrosse teams in high school, I could travel all around the country. I had been astonished that I had not thought of it before. I had finally found my “role on the team”.