Personal Narrative Essay: Overcoming Failure Of A Golf Team

Failure is never easy to overcome, especially when your failure is printed on the front page of the sports section in your local paper and your mom hangs it up on the refrigerator. “Van Buren, Schmelzer just miss trips to state,” the headline read, accompanying a picture of me putting on the 18 hole green to finish up my round of the Division III district tournament. This was my third year golfing at districts, never having made it to state, which is probably the cause of my healthy apprehension of the scores table. The most stressful part of the game of golf is watching all the scores being put up and wondering if you did enough to help your team get a spot in the next round. As the rest of my team came in with high scores, it became clear that we, once again, would narrowly miss out on the trip to the state championships.

It was about this time that my coach approached me and said,”You are going to want to stay loose because it is looking like you could be in playoff for an individual spot.” I had shot well, a team-leading 82, but it had never occurred to me that I could qualify as an individual. Just as I was getting excited at the prospect of representing my team at State, the others teams came in with scores that knocked me out of the running and made a playoff unnecessary. My hopes of going to state were obliterated for the second time that day. There was nothing I could have done, but it felt like a failure nonetheless. All I could do at that point was think,”what if?”. I went through a wide range of emotions on that short bus ride back to the school. At first I was disappointed. This was the fourth year in a row we had made it to districts only to be sent home and I wanted my senior year to be