I've played sports my entire life, and I've enjoyed them my entire life. It started out with soccer, which I loved (shout out to my ankles for not being able to deal with the pressure), then I moved on to gymnastics, which I hated. In third grade, I started swimming, which was not as good as soccer, but far better than gymnastics. I swam all throughout middle school and high school, but the game changer came my freshman year when I discovered water polo.
I fell in love with water polo instantly. It fully replaced soccer in my heart. I didn't need to have ankles of steel, it had a very similar game goal as soccer did (put the ball in the goal), and it was a very aggressive sport, so I was able to channel the day's frustrations into a two hour practice. While I absolutely loved the game, what really drew me in and captured me was the team.
I remember being terrified to go to practice my first day of high school. I had gotten lost twice, and was embarrassingly late to one of my classes. I decided that going to practice couldn't possibly be worse than the day I had already endured. I was right. I'm not really sure what I was expecting when I walked into the locker room to change for practice, but it certainly wasn't a shirt flying across the room with about 15 girls laughing hysterically about it. That was the moment I met some of my closest friends throughout high school.
Aside from countless hours spent in the pool, we also had team dinners, sleepovers, and a lot of people from the teams even went to prom together. We were a family. We are a family. I didn't just play a sport I loved with these people. I grew with them, I laughed with them, I cried with them, and I celebrated with them when we won a game. I will never forget the team that made me love the sport, and that made my high school experience the best that it could possibly be.