Playing with adversity
In the summer of 2008 I was prepared to step onto the field Friday night and play alongside my brothers that I had got to know over several years. It was my 11th year of football and throughout that entire time I had dealt with being diagnosed with diabetes. Managing my blood sugar; making sure it didn’t go too low while at the same time trying to prevent it from going to high. Playing so many years with diabetes I had mastered the art of controlling my blood sugar while competing in a high intensity sport.
Having so many hours devoted to the sport caused it to be a major part of my life. Little did I know that the very first play of my 2nd game as a senior, my life would be flipped upside down. On the opening kickoff a guy on my team pushed one of the opponents into my left knee. As I was helped off the field my initial reaction was to go back on the field as soon as possible. That’s exactly what i did. I didn’t fully realize that it would take me 5 weeks to get back onto that field.
I had gone to the doctor and discussed with my parents and decided that I would want to go back playing football with my torn ACL. In those 5 weeks I spent countless amount of time trying to make my knee as strong as possible with intense regiments of rehab before playing on it torn. Once I returned, my first few games I was in I was at about 50%. The very first game happened to be against skyline which was in the top 10 in the nation. I personally had to go against a D-1 prospect who is now attending Colorado. My knee gave out at least 11 times, resulting in me being driven into the ground in front of a crowd of about 5 thousand.
As the year continued, I had a few occasions of blood sugar being low in practice. Our team had entered the playoffs and my knee continued to gain more strength while still missing that crucial ligament. My knee was almost restored to normality by the time our team entered the state championship. It was against skyline, our rivals that happened to be only a short 9 minute drive away from our school. It was in the Tacoma dome, in front of about 9 thousand people and much more watching on TV. Even though we lost, our team had outplayed the other by having over 150 more combined yards than they had. I personally did very good as well and was satisfied with the ending of my high school football. The day after there was an article in the Seattle times sports front page talking about my playing with….diabetes and a torn ACL.
An interesting month..
In the 2009 summer I had my life all planned out. Since I tore my ACL during the prime part of football I came away the season with no scholarship offers of any kind. Even though I desperately wanted to be able to play again I was content with going to Northwest. It seemed to be a backup plan. I was ready to follow in the footsteps of my both my sisters and walk away with an experience from Northwest University.
Set with Northwest as my college for my freshman year, I was anticipating an exciting year. However, in 24 hours my world was flipped upside down. I first received a phone call from my sister Brittany, telling me that my grandpa was in the hospital and would probably not make it through the night. My grandpa is my Dad’s fathers who lives in Arizona but came up to Seattle with my grandma to visit us for 2 weeks. Throughout those 2 weeks he was very healthy which made it very surprising to see him so close to death.
Twenty minutes later I was getting ready to leave to the hospital with my sister and the phone rings and it was my other sister on the line. She told me that my Dad had lost his job. Now my dad owns his own business as a medical distributor which means him and his sales team buy medical equipment and supplies from corporations and then in return go out and sell it to hospitals in the northwest United States. Phillips, the corporations that let my dad’s business go was the same company that was responsible for about 85% of his company’s sales.
Watching my dad watch his father almost die and his business go to shambles all in the same day caused me more pain than the situation itself. My grandpa began to recover and my dad also began to recover his job. Turning to different corporations to replace Phillips my dad’s business had started to rebound. As my grandpa was recovering from being ill my only uncle came to visit. I didn’t get to see him very often but he came up for 2 weeks to see and comfort his father as he was beginning his road to a long recovery. We said good bye to him after 2 weeks of staying with us, he was headed back to his home in California.
3 days after he returned my dad gave me a phone call while I was working. I’ve always looked at my dad as a figure head in my life. He was a man of strength and leadership throughout our family. As I received that call I heard a man that was holding back pain. But then I heard him begin to cry, slowly breaking down on the other side of the phone. Now at this point in my life I had only seen my dad cry twice before. He told me that they had found my uncle, his brother, dead on his kitchen floor. It turns out that he had a destroyed kidney and suddenly dropped dead in his house. This was a sudden blow to our family but especially my dad. My poor dad who had lost his brother, almost lost his father and lost his business all within 3 weeks. Since then however, things have drastically improved. My dad has recovered his business and is doing very well and my grandpa is back in Arizona and is making drastic steps to a full recover. Those 3 weeks humbled me to appreciate not only the things I have in my life but more importantly the people I had in my life.
A child’s imagination
Growing up I was always the little ambitious and active 5 year old who would always have a curious mind that would typically get me into trouble. I would climb trees, play tag, hide-go-seek, and always I’d always being looking for something to do. At the same time I was also able to entertain myself for hours. Taking a typical toy car and turning it into a car that was also a spaceship, which also had bazooka’s attached to the sides that would destroy the bad guys that would invade my base, also known as my room. Growing up with an older brother that I admired I would watch him play video games or watch movies that typically involved some kind of violence. That is perhaps how and why I came up with my creation of art that would entertain me for the next 9 years of my life.
It started when I was drawing on a blank piece of white printer paper and began to create dinosaurs. I thought to myself, well if there are dinosaurs they have to be mean and viscous and people trying to stop them. I drew my first complete page at the age of 5 which was comprised of 2 dinosaurs and about 20 stick figure soldiers with guns trying to shoot at it. There were a few dead soldiers and a few reinforcements that were coming in but I wasn’t sure where the reinforcements were coming from. That spurred my next creative idea of just continuing the battle to the next page. So I took a new page and just taped it onto the next and drew more dinosaurs with more guys fighting them. It began with just one page but little did I know it would end with over 200 pages.
There were some parts of my life that I focused on this project more than other parts of my life. During the time when I was about 10 years old I lacked friends and didn’t know what to do with my time. Instead of going out trying to find new friends I would sit on my desk adding onto this long strand of paper. I would add in new types of guys with new weapons and new vehicles that would try to stop these evil dinosaurs. I continued at an inconsistent rate of adding more and more pages onto this strand of paper. Except at this point it was too long to call a strand of paper, instead I had to roll it up into a bundle. It continued to entertain me for hours throughout my childhood.
Now it is stored away at my parent’s house for safe keeping. Totally over 200 pieces of paper it is longer than a football field when fully rolled out. The piece of papers is something I am going to want to continue to keep to show my kids and have them see their fathers creativity when he was their age.
Baccalaureate MC
Throughout my teenage years I didn’t fully realize that I held an influence in my high school. Looking back at my four years in high school I regret the fact that I didn’t fully utilize my influence to witness to people and tell them about the God that I believe in. Even though I don’t think I fully grasp the influence I had in my four years being asked to be the MC at my schools baccalaureate was very surprising. It helped me understand that my faith was being noticed by people around my school and my personality was attached to it. It was such a great opportunity to be able to represent my Christian beliefs but at the same time attach my outgoing and confident personality with it.
In the month of May I received a letter in one of my classrooms asking me to meet with this person I had never heard of the following day. Curious on what adventure this letter could lead to I decided to check out what they wanted me to go to. When I arrived I saw several women there and they told me to sit down because they had an exciting request for me. They proceeded to talk highly of me and explained how excited it would be if I was the MC to the baccalaureate. I replied with a definite yes looking at this as an opportunity to represent my faith in front of many people.
I had never been to a baccalaureate and had no idea what to expect. It was going to be at the Mormon temple and I suddenly came to realize that I was one of the only people that were speaking at the actual baccalaureate that wasn’t Mormon. As I arrived at the temple I was shocked at the number of people that had already arrived. As the minutes went by more and more people began to fill the auditorium and I became more anxious and excited. By the time I went up to start speaking I looked out in the crowd and estimated there being at least 450 students, parents, friends and families.
As I introduced a variety of speakers and spent more time in front of that many people I found myself feeling more comfortable. I integrated humor into much of speech making my audience involved and attentive when I was speaking. For example, I was introducing several singers to sing a French song that I drastically mispronounced but I made everyone laugh by blaming the fact that I mispronounced it on the fact that the song was French. As I received a louder response to my humor I was encourage to continue doing it. I felt that my overall performance was excellent on stage but I still wasn’t sure. However, as I finished I joined my classmates and their families, friends and enjoyed some refreshments. Their responses made it seem that I did very well in my MC duties. I enjoyed the baccalaureate very much and will remember it for the rest of my life.
Selling Medical Equipment and supplies
As I grow older I am beginning to narrow down the things that I would like to do as a career when I am older. I begin to realize that my personality and the different characteristics that I am gifted with will be fully utilized in my job. I have been told my entire life that I excel and have a gift in speaking and persuading. I have noticed this too; I have always had the tendency to try to sell people different physical items but also ideas that I also hold. I am part of a family who are all very social and with that I have learned to articulate my thoughts. My liking to persuade and convince people directly ties into the business profession. The chance to sell medical equipment and supplies was very fortunate opportunity for me.
During the 2010 summer I was blessed with the exceptional opportunity to work for my parents. I went across to different doctors’ offices, retirement homes, physical therapy offices and sold medical equipment and supplies for my parents business. This work allowed me to gain experience in the business world which will definitely prove very applicable to what I want to do in the future. Every time I went out to go work I would interact with different professionals and tell them about what I was selling. At first, I designed my own brochure on the computer that briefly explained the most popular items that I was selling. I was able to use this brochure to hand to the different therapists and doctors to show them that there were items that could be useful to them and their businesses. Even though this working experience only lasted a few months I gained more applicable experience than any other thing I did. This will also look very good on my resume when I am freshly out of college and applying for some kind of sales/business job.
State Qualifier
When looking back in my high school years I try to remember things that drastically stand out in my life and what made the most impact. These things may include my different experience with God and my church or my enjoyment with my football team but one time in my life that I believe had some of the most impact on my life is DECA. DECA stands for the distributive education clubs of America which is a club that is focused on business in many different states and countries around the world. It teaches kids very applicable knowledge of the business world and how to appropriately interact with people in the business world. This class was naturally motivating for me since I could clearly see the usefulness that the information I was learning could have for my future.
Every single year DECA will have a regional tournament where kids compete in to qualify to move onto the state tournament and perhaps even nationals. Just like playing a competitive sport DECA causes an intense thrill when you move onto the next stage or often a feeling of defeat when you don’t move on. Since DECA is a country wide club with many different schools participating, the DECA tournaments are competitions in which thousands of kids come together and compete.
The format of the DECA is nothing like that of a sports event. Instead of working together as a team to fight against another team to see who performed better over the other, the majority of the DECA tournaments are individual. The scoring is individual and at the end of the tournament your score is compiled with the rest of the tournament participant scores and the top players move onto state or nationals. The person going into the tournament will pick a broad topic before the tournament even begins that have to do with business or marketing. They will then spend much of their time before the tournament studying the topics that they chose to learn more about how the business or marketing works in that subject or field of work.
When I went to pick my topic I decided to go into retail marketing since I had little prior knowledge about the marketing in retail stores and I was fascinated in the marketing ideas in different stores and how it affects their consumers. I ended up spending many hours’ weeks before the tournament learning in detail the exact methodology of the marketing in stores. The preparation however would prove very useful when the actual tournament came around.
When I arrived in the state tournament I was extremely nervous expecting it to be very difficult due to the fact that my teacher and previous students made it out to be very challenging. I was sent to a room and given 20 minutes of preparation time and given a prompt of a role playing situation where I was a manager and there was an issue in the store’s marketing and I had to come up with a proposal of a solution to fix it. The 20 minutes of preparation was not nearly enough time to efficiently brainstorm effective solutions so this whole process taught me to be able to think on quickly and effectively. Now I was presenting this proposal to my judge who in the role playing acted as my corporate boss over me. The judges that were placed in the DECA tournaments were actual bosses out in the business world who would judge us as if they were judging their actual managers that were under them. This created a very realistic situation and caused us as students to adapt and enter into the real life business world while still in high school.
I sat down and gave him the entire proposal and presented it very professionally as if the situation was actually happening. His responses were questionable and it was challenging for me to be able to tell whether or not he enjoyed it. After I was finished I was not at ease because I had no idea what he thought of my proposal. The award ceremony came around and I was waiting to see whether or not I qualified for the state tournament. I was one of the last people called and I ended up getting one of the awards that was given to the best speakers. I was surprised but at the same time knew that I had that talent to speak confidently no matter who I am speaking to. I ended up qualifying for state with one of the highest scores in the entire region. This experience proved to be very applicable to my life as I want to begin to venture into the business world. I am definitely grateful that I had the opportunity to compete in the DECA tournament and was blessed to be able to also qualify and compete in the DECA state tournament.
