Personal Narrative: A Career In A Sports Team

Throughout my middle school athletic career, I was a very dedicated volleyball player. I played all year around and spent most of my free time practicing and taking private lessons in order to better myself before it came time to try out at the high school level. After all of my hard work and dedication did not pay off and I was denied an invitation to join the high school team, I had to quickly find an alternative way to get involved. I had always been on a sports team and was unsure I would be able to survive without being on one to keep me busy. My friend, who was a year older than me in school, urged me to join the high school cross country team. Being on the cross country team was completely different from being on the volleyball team, not only because of the switch in sports. The volleyball team was very serious and competitive, while cross country was very open and accepting of great runners and people who just wanted to be

If I had not had a mentor on the team I would have struggled to have learned the behaviors and actions that took place. Being a new member of the team was difficult, even though we easily found our statuses on the team through natural tendencies. Social construction is the process in which individual roles and statuses are naturally replaced in order to keep a system working. However, if I would not have had a mentor to show me the ropes and explain to me why things were the way they were on the team, I probably would have lacked the knowledge to fulfill my role and status in the group. Reading 2 mentions the idea that we must find the difference between ourselves and the “social,” or the group in order to really understand why things function the way that they do. As time went on and I became accustomed to the ways of communicating that my team had as well as their rituals, it was much easier for me to find my place and function within the