Advanced Essay #1: Don't Underestimate

Advanced Essay

I am going to start this paper with a scene from my life. This scene is from when I was playing in a football game when I was eight years old. I was well under four feet tall and weighed less than fortyfive pounds. I was the smallest kid on my team. This is interesting because my last name, Gorski, means mountain. So anyway, it was the second quarter, first down and ten, the ball was in the redzone. Ironically, I was playing right guard, a position normally played by one of the bigger players on the team. I lined up against my opponent, a defensive tackle two full heads taller than me. The center snaps the ball and I struggle to block my opponent. Eventually he knocks me down and gets to the quarterback sacking him. He was fast getting up off the line but I knew I was faster. Next play and the center snaps the ball. Then, almost instantly, I am in my opponent’s face. I get my forearms under his shoulder pads and push up with all my strength. This time he goes down, his face frozen in astonishment. The quarterback makes the throw and… Touchdown! At the end of the play stood over my opponent and said, “Don’t get back up or I will knock you down again.” At that moment his coach pulled him off the field and didn’t put him back in the game. In this scene I did not expect to knock down the other kid. Especially not after he knocked me down the play before. I knew I could block him. So I did do better than I had expected. After reading this scene some people might say that I can be a little arrogant at times. They are right but also wrong at the same time. It may seem like I am being arrogant but if I put my mind to something, most of the time I can do it.

At my old school there was a mentally gifted program. It started in fifth grade and went to eighth grade. You have to take a test to get in and if you get a good enough score they put you in the program. I was able to take the test and I had been the only one to get into the program with a one hundred percent that year. I knew I was smart but I didn’t know I was the smartest kid in my grade. I thought that someone must be smarter than me, but nobody was. However that didn’t surprise me too much.

This scene is from when I was playing lacrosse in seventh grade. I had been playing lacrosse for two years prior to this and for the second year I played goalie. In this game I played goalie for the entire time. The referee blows his whistle and asks the starting line up for each team to line up at mid field. He asks the goalies, me and the other one, to shake hands and then go to our goals. Then the rest of both teams shake hands and it was time to start the game. By the end of the first quarter my team was winning and the other team still hadn’t scored on me. The second and third quarters ended the same way. However towards the end of the fourth quarter the other team scored I was disappointed in myself because it was an easy shot to stop. The game ended and my team won. While I was still beating myself up for letting that shot go in. Then the head coach for Father Judge High School’s junior varsity team called me over. He said that their goalie didn’t show up for their game starting in a few minutes and that he saw how good I played in the game before. Then he asked me to play for them. I was really tired at that point so I respectfully declined the offer. So the backup goalie for my team played for them. In this scene I also did way better than I had expected. However this scene is different because I was not thinking about how well I did. I focused on the negatives instead of the positives. Everyone from my team was happy we won except for me. Until the coach from Father Judge High School showed me that I did really good. Good enough to play with kids two plus years older than me. I do regret not playing in that game but if I did I probably would have done well.