It was the winter of sixth grade, the year before I had quit football because of an ankle injury and during the fall I had started swimming for the Bergen Barracudas. I was fresh off my growth spurt when I walked into the FAMS gymnasium for tryouts for the sixth grade basketball team. I had tried out for the team two times before but both times I did not make it. I was easily one of the worst players during tryouts but the team desperately needed size in order to compete the coach accepted me on to the team. My parents were ecstatic.

At the first basketball practice I didn’t even bring a pair of basketball shoes; I came to practice wearing running shoes, which was a complete embarrassment to me. However in my first game I earned the MVP of the game medal for my effort rebounding and shot blocking. But the rest of my sixth grade travel basketball season was lackluster. I was by far one of the worst players on the team, despite being much larger than my opponents I struggled at running the court, catching balls, and converting lay ups. During sixth grade the most I had in one game was 10 points, however most of the time I wouldn’t play or I would get extremely limited playing time. In the games I didn’t play in were some of the hardest parts of the season. Even though no one told me I knew that everyone on the team and in the school knew that I was one of the worst basketball players on the team and it was a joke for me not being able to make use of my height. When I went into the spring I was determined to make my self-better at basketball and not become a laughing stock. My coach recommended me to play AAU in the offseason in order to get better.

In the offseason I played basketball for GOATS AAU on the B-team, the practices were extremely hard for me at the time, we ran sprints, did wall sits and did defensive slides for what I felt were the hardest one hours of my life. On goats I had a much bigger role than I had on the Franklin Lakes travel team, I scored a career high 20 points one game and had multiple 10+ rebound games. When I entered seventh grade I felt confident that I was a better player and could help compete on the travel team now.

The seventh grade season may have been even more disappointing for me than the sixth grade season, even though I saw increased minutes and had a few good games, and I made the middle school basketball team. But to know that I had put so much work in the offseason and struggled in most games and everyone still thought that I was bad at basketball was humiliating. For the middle school team I barely played but that was expected of me since I was a seventh grader and we went on to win the league championship for the first time in school history. In travel our team was doing slightly worse than last year since other teams were so much bigger than us, when there was a big guy on the other team and coach wouldn’t play me against him since he didn’t have confidence in me was one of the worst feelings ever, especially if I could have done something to contribute. By the end of the season I had slid all the way down to the end of the bench. I was so disappointed with myself; by the end of the season I was considering quitting basketball.

With the graduation of the 8th graders who lead us to the championship, coach expected a lot out of us 7th graders. This put a lot of pressure on me to meet the expectations of our middle school coach, that offseason I trained super hard to make sure that I would become a good basketball player. That spring and summer I continued to play AAU and I dominated. I had multiple double-digit games and even some game winners. I effectively became the one of the go to options and one of the most like players on the team. I also felt as if I was playing some of the best basketball of my life during that time. Coming into the 8th grade I felt that I had worked the hardest in the offseason and confident that I could live up to my expectations and have a breakout season.

At the start of the 8th grade season four of the starters on the travel team quit, opening one of the starting spots to me. For the middle school team I also earned the starting spot, despite this there was still talk about how I wasn’t good and how I didn’t deserve to start. When we were nominating captains, I was the last 8th grader to be nominated and I got the least amount of votes. In the first middle school game I struggled with only four points and the next game I was demoted to the bench. In the next game I rebounded with a breakout performance off the bench with double digits, and I was reinstated to the starting lineup. As the season went on I would average three times the amount I scored for 7th grade travel the year before. I felt that over the season I had established myself as one of the best players on the team. My numbers were even better on the travel team, coach made me the primary source of offense, which meant that for the first time I would have a large amount of touches, and because we were playing in the B league against inferior competition, my numbers were even higher. I was averaging a double- double (10 points and 10 rebounds) every game. Before I was just happy to score two points, now I wasn’t content with myself unless I scored over 10 also I was my height advantage wasn’t as great as it was in 6th grade yet I was still thriving. However the travel team was .500 at best. This was partly because the bench was not very deep. Mid-way through the season even more bench players quit due to lack of minutes, leaving the team with only 8 total players. Because of this I was playing a full game for the first time in my career. By the end of the middle school regular season I was the second leading scorer, averaging 7 points a game. By the end of the travel season I was the leading scorer on the team with multiple dominating performances including a 26-point performance against Allendale. Unfortunately the middle school basketball season ended with an extremely close playoff game verse Montvale, the loss was even more depressing because I had performed poorly, I only had four points and I fouled out of the game with two minutes remaining. It was a truly depressing way to end my FAMS career but I was still generally happy by how much I had improved since seventh grade. However the travel team season would continue on for a couple more weeks, in the first round we defeated a team we had lost to by 40 earlier in the season. I had another strong performance with a double-double. However in the next playoff game we lost to the number one seed Ramsey in a close game. However after that game I wasn’t upset. I was grateful that I had made big improvements during my three-year basketball career and went from being the worst player on the team to the one of the best. I was especially thankful for all of my coaches, who took me in when I was bad and mentored me into a great player.