Competition (380)

There is competition everywhere you look. In sports, school, and work. There are always people wanting to be better than others. In sports, you are fighting to be the best so you have that starting position, or trying to show that you are better to get the spot on the team you are trying out for. Things people do to beat their competition are coming in early to practice, having extra training sessions, working out to get stronger than your competition, and more. Sometimes all it takes is giving more effort in practice and having a better attitude than your competition. There are also things you can do to get in better shape so you can be more athletically inclined than your competition. You can eat better and do things like work out and run to get in better shape. If you do these things, you have to stick to a set plan or schedule and not quit or only do it sometimes.

In school you want to do better than others and get the best grades. There is always a push to do better in school. People that do their homework and take time to study for the tests usually do better than those that do not. Also, if you are struggling, or just want to raise your grade, you can do things like extra credit if it is offered, staying after school for help, going to tutorials for help or make up work, and talking to the teacher to see if there is anything else you can do to raise your grade or anything they can do to help you understand the class better. 

 In work, you want to be better than your co-workers to earn a pay raise that they might not get, or maybe just to not get fired. Things people might do in their work are making sure they are there on time or early every day, staying later for extra work, or being more efficient with their time while they are at work. 

Most importantly, do not give up. Whatever you are doing or trying to get better at is not going to be easy, but if you give up you definitely will not make it, so do not give up and keep pushing. 

Car rides (386)

When you play sports, especially club sports, you tend to go on a lot of long car rides for out of town tournaments. When people hear of long car rides, most think how boring they are. While this is somewhat true, there are many things you can do in the car to spend the time. First it depends on how long your car ride is, because that can limit what you can do during your car ride. Sometimes your car ride is only about two hours or less, or they are really long rides that are about 9 hours or more, and everything in between. If you want to be productive, you can do homework that you are missing to be on the car ride or that you are behind on, that is if you have any. You could also do work in the car if you have a job and it is possible to do your work in the car. You could read a book, because when else are you going to have time to read right? If you do not care to be productive, you could do other things. You could watch movies or TV shows on Netflix, and if your car ride is long enough, have a marathon of the show of your choice. You could also have a long conversation with the people you are in the car with if you have a lot to talk about. Another thing to do with the people in the car is play any games you can think of, but that might get boring fast since most people can not think of a lot of fun games for the car that last a long time. Another thing that you can do, and I do all the time, is sleep! I love to sleep in the car because it makes the car  ride go by so much faster. One nap and you have already spent two hours of the ride! One more thing people can do in the car is listen to music. Some people might get bored of this since you are not really doing anything, but I can listen to music for a long time and not be bored. People could also listen to music while they are doing other things, like napping and homework.

Adding the Windy City Qualifier (390)

On our club team, we enjoy competing in big tournaments. Every year a team gets a certain amount of these big tournaments and qualifiers. This year we were supposed to have two qualifiers and regionals for qualifying tournaments. The two qualifiers were Mideast Qualifier and Northern Lights Qualifier, but we didn't get into the Northern Lights Qualifier, so that leaves us with only one qualifier. In the past, I have gone to three or four qualifying tournaments, but this year we only have two. Our team was somewhat disappointed with that, so we tried to add another qualifier. We wanted to go to the Windy City Qualifier in Chicago. One of our parents, Crystal May, organized all of the information and let all the players and parents on our team know about it. First, we had to make sure that everyone could go that weekend and we all could, except later one of our girls said she couldn't, but we still had nine people who could go, which is enough to play. We were excited for this new tournament that we were going to add because this tournament was another chance for us to earn a bid and qualify for nationals! This is a big deal because right now we only have one chance to earn an open bid from a qualifier because at regionals they do not give out open bids, just national and american bids. We asked our coach if he could go and he could, so the next step was to ask our club director. We let him know about the tournament we wanted to add and waited for a response. Unfortunately he did not have us go to the tournament, because apparently there were multiple families who could not go. We were disappointed by this because we really wanted another chance to qualify for nationals and to play really good competition. All of the girls on this team are really dedicated to playing and are always up for more playing! As of now, we are on the top of the waiting list to get into Northern Lights. This means that if a team that is currently in the tournament drops out, that spot will open up to us and we can be in the tournament. Hopefully that happens so that we can play in another qualifier!