All athletes experience pressure. That’s a given when someone wants to give their 110% for the sport they love and play. Coaches, or even the players themselves, set high expectations, but to stay focused and remember why they’re playing the sport is what is most crucial to an athlete. There’s a specific type of pressure that comes with being moved up to an older, higher level team as a freshman in high school. Being put on varsity as a freshman is a great responsibility and a great opportunity. However, with being the youngest player on the team comes adversities and pressures.
Being the youngest on a team, where everyone is older and more experienced, comes with challenges that can be tough to handle. Sophomore Aubrey Doss faced many challenges as a freshman on the Varsity Soccer Team. Doss states one of her biggest adversities was, “One of the hardest challenges I faced was being my first time ever playing soccer, and being on Varsity, especially for a beginner,” she explained.
Similarly to Aubrey Doss, this past school volleyball season, Addyson Lincoln was moved up to Varsity, even though she’s fairly new to the sport. Unlike most Varsity teams, Rocky’s Varsity volleyball was filled with mostly seniors. With a majority of the team being seniors, that means all those girls are well experienced, and with that, comes more pressure trying to keep up with them. “The feeling of having to do good all the time, and be more like the upperclassmen,” Lincoln expressed. “Just getting close with the upperclassmen, and proving that I deserved to be there,” she explained was another challenge to being on the team.
Anything and everything in life comes with challenges, but how one deals with and responds to the situation is what matters most. Doss mentions, “Coming from a person that puts a lot of pressure on myself, and has very high expectations, I had to learn, and am still learning, that there is only so much that I can do.” Lincoln states, “Just being able to remember it is just a game, and you’re gonna fail, but you learn from those mistakes/failures”.
All in all, athletes are bound to feel pressure while playing their sport, but passion is what truly drives them to excel more and more each time. Doss and Lincoln are great examples of facing different and difficult conflicts, but finding the good in those situations and working hard.
