Life’s full of irony, and today I was just hit with a heavy dose of it. Right after mak­ing a post about how I could just sit back and relax in regards to get­ting into col­lege, I real­ized that I had a major issue upon me.  Tues­day marks the start of the new semes­ter, and for seniors at my high school, that means switch­ing our reli­gion classes. Our school offers four one0semester reli­gion classes for seniors to choose from there’s Com­par­a­tive Reli­gion, Phi­los­o­phy, Peace and Jus­tice, and Chris­t­ian Lifestyles.  My two pro­jected reli­gion classes were Com­par­a­tive Reli­gion and Phi­los­o­phy. How­ever, upon get­ting my sched­ule yes­ter­day, it turns out  that I was enrolled in Peace and Jus­tice, as opposed to the Phi­los­o­phy course that I was sup­posed to take this com­ing semester.

Now as a stu­dent, I’m as low key as they come. I don’t care what teach­ers I get, nor do I fancy trans­fer­ring in and out of classes. Basi­cally, once I get my ini­tial sched­ule at the start of the school year, it’s set in stone. How­ever, with this sched­ule mishap I had to take an excep­tion. On all of my col­lege apps I put that I was tak­ing Phi­los­o­phy, which meant that tak­ing Peace and Jus­tice would cause seri­ous con­sis­tency issues in regards to my appli­ca­tion and tran­scripts. Hav­ing such a con­sis­tency issue would mean that my admit­tance to what­ever col­leges I got into, would be revoked once they reviewed my final tran­script and noticed that I had two com­pletely dif­fer­ent classes listed.

So I went to go see my coun­selor today to rec­tify the prob­lem but as it turns out, I’m shit out of luck. Basi­cally, with the way my sched­ule is, and with the lack of empty seats avail­able in other classes, no amount of muta­tions to my sched­ule would make it pos­si­ble for me to take a Phi­los­o­phy course. The biggest issue comes from the fact that I take jour­nal­ism which is only offered dur­ing my sec­ond period. Because of that, the amount of workarounds that could be done to my sched­ule were too few to get me into a Phi­los­o­phy class. It’s a long and com­plex thing to dis­cuss, but it basi­cally means that I have the one kind of sched­ule that can’t be fixed to solve the problem.

I am usu­ally the last per­son to absolve myself of blame, but this time I think I just got screwed by cir­cum­stance. First off, on my orig­i­nal sign up sheet I clearly listed phi­los­o­phy, and I met all of the pre-reqs to get into the class. I know this because my coun­selor and I looked it up just to be sure,  it was sim­ply entered into the com­puter wrong.  Sec­ond, I was under the assump­tion that I was tak­ing Phi­los­o­phy in the months lead­ing up to this event, so it isn’t like I saw this com­ing and just decided to act on it now. This basi­cally came out of nowhere, and aside from rais­ing hell about the issue, there’s not much that I can do about it.

Now the good thing is that I won’t have to change around my sched­ule to accom­mo­date a Phi­los­o­phy class, which is good con­sid­er­ing that I like my teach­ers, and all of the peo­ple in my classes. The other good thing is that Peace and Jus­tice is a UC and Cal State approved course, which means that chang­ing the course shouldn’t be an issue for most col­leges. What this does mean though, is that even if I do get accepted into a col­lege, it won’t be 100% approved until I call them and explain my sit­u­a­tion. If that doesn’t work out for some rea­son and my accep­tance gets revoked, then all hell will prob­a­bly break lose.

Sigh, some­times I just gotta vent.

As a senior in high school I get asked two ques­tions quite fre­quently. The first is “Are you a Senior now?” to which I obvi­ously respond yes. The sec­ond ques­tion that fol­lows is “Oh, where are you apply­ing to Col­lege?” Every per­son that I have met this past year has asked me that ques­tion, and answer­ing it has quickly become one of the most annoy­ing aspects that I’ve had to deal with this year. Just bear in mind, I’ve had to endure the com­bined forces of Alex Guichet’s Pho­to­blog, and this Twit­ter phe­nom­e­non that is tak­ing the world by storm,  so I know what annoy­ing is. Regard­less, I usu­ally respond with the typ­i­cal. “Oh, well I want to major in film right now so Chapman’s my num­ber one choice because they have a great Film pro­gram.” Now if I’m lucky, the per­son will have heard of Chap­man and will sim­ply stop ques­tion­ing me at that point, but more often than not they ask me where else I’m apply­ing to. Of course, this isn’t a very fair ques­tion to ask me because I’ve applied to about ten dif­fer­ent col­leges thus far, and ask­ing me to list all of them, is a lit­tle ridicu­lous. How­ever, being the polite con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist that I am I pro­ceed to list my col­lege choices.

“Well sec­ond there’s LMU, then Notre Dame, UCLA would be great to get into, but I’m also apply­ing to UCSD, and UCSB.” “What about the Cal States?” “Oh well I applied to a bunch of those too, Cal State Long Beach has a great pro­gram, so does Cal State North­ridge, in fact I just got into Cal State North­ridge” “Oh well con­grat­u­la­tions do you think you’ll go there?” “Well that depends on where else I get accepted to” “When do you hear back?” “Oh prob­a­bly around march” “Ah, so where else have you applied?” “I also applied to San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, and Cal State Mon­terey Bay, and that’s about it.” “Wow, Mon­terey Bay!?”

I think you get the pic­ture.  The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that ask­ing a Senior which col­lege they are going to is about as com­pul­sory as ask­ing a preg­nant woman whether she’s hav­ing a boy or girl.  In the eyes of the inter­roga­tor, it’s a sim­ple sub­ject to delve into,  and it’s also per­sonal enough and often com­plex enough to make the con­ver­sa­tion inter­est­ing. Plus there’s the added bonus that  the help­less per­son being inter­ro­gated will feel as if the inter­roga­tor actu­ally cares about where they are going to col­lege, because as well know, col­lege is very seri­ous busi­ness. The thing that the inter­roga­tor often for­gets though is the fact that per­son being inter­ro­gated has been asked the same ques­tion three times a week for the past year, and they have already heard every pos­si­ble response that some­one can give them. This obvi­ously makes the con­ver­sa­tion about as excit­ing as telling a per­son a joke that they’ve already heard. By that I mean it’s not excit­ing, and that such a con­ver­sa­tion would only serve to boost the self esteem of the per­son who is telling the joke. Which of course is sim­ply bad con­ver­sa­tion etiquette.

Putting that sub­ject aside, I’ve finally fin­ished my col­lege appli­ca­tions. It was a long, tir­ing, painful, and down­right stress­ful process, but I got it done, and a huge bur­den has been lifted off of my back. My final list of col­leges that I applied to (in order of where I want to get in) is:

1. Chap­man

2. UCLA

3. Notre Dame

4. LMU

5 .UCSD

6. UCSB

7. CSULB

8. CSUN

9. SFSU

10. CSUMB

It’s quite an exten­sive list, but it is packed with very rep­utable col­leges all which should offer me a great edu­ca­tion and a great place to live by attend­ing any one of them. As I’ve expressed pre­vi­ously, I only applied to places where I thought that I would enjoy attend­ing. The idea was to make it so that being accepted to any one of these col­leges would be a vic­tory, and so far things are look­ing really good. I’ve been accepted to Cal State North­ridge as well as San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, which are two of the nicer schools in the Cal State Sys­tem. Hope­fully I’ll be accepted to at least one of my top 5 schools as well.

As excit­ing as pick­ing a col­lege is, it’s also incred­i­bly stress­ful. Fill­ing out appli­ca­tions is like being asked to bake a cake for the fresh­man girl at Conel­ley that you really have a crush on, but are too afraid to talk to. On one hand, you know that mak­ing a good cake will make her like you. But on the other hand, you have no idea what kind of cake she wants, and if you make her the wrong one then your chances with her are screwed for­ever. This kind of sit­u­a­tion made writ­ing my col­lege essays par­tic­u­larly painful. Most essays expected that I write about an aspect of my life that was impor­tant, and influ­en­tial to me. Sounds easy enough on paper right? After all I am a blog­ger and all I do is write about myself for 90% of the time. How­ever, when it came to actu­ally sit­ting down and writ­ing the essays, it turned out that I was sim­ply crippled.

I couldn’t think of a topic that would be inter­est­ing enough to catch the atten­tion of the admis­sions rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Not only that, I often had to com­press my essay to be about 500 words long. In the inter­est of extend­ing our cake metaphor, it’s like find­ing out that you have to make the cake in less then twenty four hours, you only have 10 dol­lars to spend on it, and you’re forced to buy the ingre­di­ents at El Metate Mar­ket. It can be done of course, but it’s just not the ideal sit­u­a­tion to go about doing things. Any­ways, this kind of pres­sure meant that I ended up spend­ing six hour days writ­ing stu­pid 500 word essays for col­lege. As I keep men­tion­ing, the process was painful, embar­rass­ing, and some­times dis­grace­ful, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that most of them turned out badly anyways.

That aside, I’m still strangely con­fi­dent in my abil­i­ties to get accepted into my top 5 col­leges. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve already been accepted to 2 col­leges, and I’m tech­ni­cally 2–0 as far as my accep­tance to rejec­tion ratio is con­cerned. Out­side of that, I also think it has to do with the fact that I really didn’t feel the need to prove myself to the col­leges that I was apply­ing to. Obvi­ously, I tried to impress them, and I gave them my heart­felt responses to all of their ridicu­lous appli­ca­tion ques­tions, but I didn’t get des­per­ate. Look­ing back at my resume I real­ized that I’ve been involved in a plethora of real activ­i­ties in high school, and that I’ve accom­plished quite a bit in my high school career.  Nowhere in my appli­ca­tion did bull­shit clubs like Key Club, or NHS, show up, nor did I have an inflated num­ber of ser­vice hours for doing silly things at my Church (Ahem, Mr. Guichet). I guess one could say that I applied to col­lege on my own terms, I applied where I wanted to apply to, and told them what I wanted them to hear, not what THEY wanted to hear.

As March comes closer, which means a bar­rage of accep­tance and denial let­ters, I some­times ques­tion my col­lege choice. Being a film­maker is such an erratic lifestyle, with so many ups and downs. Some­times I feel as if I’m on the top of the world and seri­ously have a shot at mak­ing it big. Other times I feel as if I’m tal­ent­less and ques­tion whether I should really be pur­su­ing film. Then there’s those fleet­ing moments of artis­tic bliss, which catch me by sur­prise every cou­ple of weeks. They’re a eupho­ria of cre­ativ­ity, poten­tial, and imag­i­na­tion, and when I expe­ri­ence them, I know that major­ing in film is the right path for me.

With Col­lege apps out of the way, I’ve over­come a major hur­dle in my senior year. Now all I have to do is sit back and relax until I start get­ting accepted into place. Or in the case that I don’t, per­haps start con­sid­er­ing the air force.

Sarah Smith was not the typ­i­cal child ath­lete. While she was involved in a tra­di­tional cock­tail of sports, such as base­ball, soc­cer, and swim­ming, it was the fact that she was the off­spring of a for­mer Stan­ford line­backer that truly set her apart. At the age of six she pos­sessed the per­fect ath­letic build, tall, mus­cu­lar, yet slen­der, she was able to tower over boys and girls alike, uti­liz­ing a lethal mix­ture of grace, and power to over­whelm her com­pe­ti­tion in all three of her cho­sen sports. At the age of ten, Sarah had the unique oppor­tu­nity of attend­ing a swim train­ing camp headed by Olympic ath­letes freshly return­ing from the two thou­sand sum­mer Olympics. Inspired by the expe­ri­ence to become an Olympian her­self, Sarah aban­doned base­ball and soc­cer, in order to com­pletely ded­i­cate her­self to swim­ming. By the age of eleven Sarah had joined a highly com­pet­i­tive club team, and given her nat­ural gift as an ath­lete, she flour­ished. Sarah shat­tered her old records, won nearly all of her races, and when all was said and done she was on a path to becom­ing one of Orange County’s pre­mier youth swim­mers. At the age of twelve Sarah suf­fered a foot injury, after falling off her back yard tram­po­line. She was advised by her doc­tors to avoid swim­ming for at least six months in order for the foot to heal, yet Sarah and her coaches had other plans. After merely a few weeks of rest, Sarah was back in the water prac­tic­ing at full inten­sity, and swim­ming through a copi­ous amount of pain due to her foot. Despite Sarah’s resilience and ded­i­ca­tion to swim­ming, her efforts were not rewarded in com­pe­ti­tion. She added a great amount of time to her events, mak­ing her slower than when she was before she ded­i­cated her­self towards swim­ming. Win­ning a race became more of a pipe dream, as Sarah was lucky to even fin­ish fifth place in her races. At the age of thir­teen, Sarah vowed to never again step foot in a pool, quit­ting swim­ming for­ever, and end­ing her dream of becom­ing an Olympian.

As a com­pet­i­tive swim coach, sto­ries like this are all too preva­lent. Tal­ented, hard­work­ing kids set out on a quest to become pro­fes­sional ath­letes, only to have their dreams crushed by career end­ing injuries or a psy­cho­log­i­cal col­lapses. The scary part is, the kids who I am refer­ring to can be as young as eight years old. Pre­sented with such a tragic sce­nario, one must ask them­selves, what is it that pushes chil­dren to the “break­ing point” ? Is it over com­pet­i­tive par­ents and coaches who push their young child ath­letes over the edge by pac­ing them through gru­el­ing prac­tices and end­less com­pe­ti­tion? Is it the actual sport itself being too rig­or­ous for the child to phys­i­cally han­dle at such a young age? Or is it the sub­con­scious real­iza­tion that the sac­ri­fices it takes to become a pro­fes­sional ath­lete are too great for the typ­i­cal sec­ond grader to endure?

If one were to sur­vey the typ­i­cal high school ath­lete from a few decades ago, as to what sport he or she played. The answer would most likely be a vari­ety of sports, includ­ing a par­tic­u­lar sport for each sea­son of the year. In con­trast, if one were to sur­vey today’s high school ath­letes as to what sports they played, the answer would likely be sin­gle dimen­sional, with the only excep­tion being ath­letes who played sports that directly built off each other, such as swim­ming and water polo, or track and cross coun­try. Why is it that today’s ath­letes are only ded­i­cat­ing them­selves to a few sports, as opposed to the broad array of sports that the ath­letes of years past par­tic­i­pated in? The level of sport­ing com­pe­ti­tion has sky­rock­eted. With the devel­op­ment of trav­el­ing club teams, expen­sive pri­vate coaches, and an absolute drive to be the most suc­cess­ful ath­lete pos­si­ble, the amount of ded­i­ca­tion required to par­tic­i­pate in sports has risen dra­mat­i­cally. Com­pare for instance my recre­ational swim team prac­tices with that of a club team. My swim team prac­tices for an hour a day, swim­ming no more than two thou­sand yards a day, with most of that being fairly easy stroke work. The typ­i­cal club team on the other hand holds two prac­tices a day, both of which last in excess of an hour and half, with the typ­i­cal yardage of these prac­tices being at least four thou­sand yards of rig­or­ous swim­ming. It’s easy to see that there’s a stark dif­fer­ence between the level of com­mit­ment for a recre­ational team, and that of a hyper com­pet­i­tive club team. Given that con­trast, it goes with­out say­ing that kids are being pushed too hard by their coaches and par­ents to com­pete at a level that is sim­ply beyond their capa­bil­i­ties. From a phys­i­cal stand­point, it’s no sur­prise that so many kids get injured at such an early age. For a devel­op­ing child, swim­ming tens of thou­sands of yards each week, is just ask­ing to increase their chances for a shoul­der injury later on in life. Let’s not for­get the psy­cho­log­i­cal aspects either, few peo­ple yet alone chil­dren, can stand wak­ing up in the early hours of the morn­ing to do a rig­or­ous prac­tice of swim­ming, only to return later in the evening for an even harder prac­tice. Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief amongst hyper com­pet­i­tive coaches and par­ents, the human mind and body does not func­tion like a machine. Con­stant rep­e­ti­tion of the same phys­i­cal exer­cise and an end­less cycle of rig­or­ous prac­tice and com­pe­ti­tion does take a toll on a per­son. While prac­tice and con­sis­tency is nec­es­sary to prop­erly develop a com­pet­i­tive ath­lete, the degree of which now required by club teams is far too great for chil­dren to han­dle, as evi­denced by the sud­den burst of sports related injuries amongst youth in recent years.

The aver­age swim­mer burns twenty three calo­ries per twenty five yard lap in a stan­dard pool, more if their heart rate is ele­vated. Con­sid­er­ing that a club level swim­mer will most likely swim between six thou­sand and eight thou­sand yards a day, they will lit­er­ally burn about six thou­sand to eight thou­sand calo­ries a day, or to bet­ter quan­tify that, three to four days worth of food. Given this exam­ple, it is safe to inves­ti­gate the pos­si­bil­ity that the sports of today’s youth ath­letes are too rig­or­ous for them to be par­tic­i­pat­ing in. High inten­sity, endurance based sports such as Swim­ming, Cross Coun­try, Track, and many more, require an absolute drive for con­di­tion­ing with the aver­age prac­tices of these sports being mini-marathons each and every day. High impact sports such as gym­nas­tics and cheer also pose a seri­ous risk for devel­op­ing chil­dren as the level of impact on the devel­op­ing joints makes them sus­cep­ti­ble to an abun­dance of injuries. Com­pare high endurance or acro­batic based sports with that of more tra­di­tional sports such as foot­ball, soc­cer, base­ball, and bas­ket­ball, and it is obvi­ous why these tra­di­tional sports have less “burn outs” and “injuries”. The aver­age prac­tices for these kinds of sports, while intense, are sep­a­rated by peri­ods of con­di­tion­ing, tech­nique, and strat­egy plac­ing less over­all stress on the body in com­par­i­son to the con­di­tion based prac­tices of endurance sports and acro­bat­ics. In fact it is more likely that ath­letes of tra­di­tional sports will develop injuries sim­ply due to in game mishaps, and acci­dents, as opposed to over stress­ing cer­tain areas of the body. Obvi­ously, it would be absurd to sug­gest that chil­dren should not run, swim, or par­tic­i­pate in acro­bat­ics. How­ever, due to their aggres­sive nature on the body, the inten­sity and time spent per­form­ing these activ­i­ties should be strictly controlled.

The chances of becom­ing a pro­fes­sional ath­lete are minis­cule. Of all the ath­letes that play high school foot­ball only one per­cent of those ath­letes go on to play in col­lege, and of those col­lege ath­letes, only one per­cent of them go on to play pro­fes­sion­ally. When all is said and done, one would have a greater chance of being struck by light­ning, as opposed to becom­ing a pro­fes­sional ath­lete. Even if one were to become a pro­fes­sional ath­lete, there’s still a very preva­lent chance of injury pre­ma­turely end­ing one’s pro­fes­sional career. Given such imper­vi­ous odds for suc­cess it’s no sur­prise that some­where down the road a child real­izes that even given their hard work and ded­i­ca­tion to a sport, their chances for suc­cess are minute. Once an ath­lete comes to this real­iza­tion, it is very hard from a psy­cho­log­i­cal stand­point to stay moti­vated, espe­cially given the rig­or­ous prac­tices day in and day out that they most likely endure. Due to our very nature as humans, once the pos­i­tive reward for our efforts is removed, our will­ing­ness to con­tinue such efforts dras­ti­cally wanes, and thus we move on. This same behav­ior is demon­strated in child ath­letes, who upon real­iz­ing that the desired results for their hard work and ded­i­ca­tion, will never come to fruition, will sim­ply quite the sport of their choice, often feel­ing dejected and bit­ter afterwards.

Given the hyper com­pet­i­tive state of today’s youth sports a poignant line is being drawn in regards to the lim­its of today’s youth. From a phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal stand­point the rig­ors of hyper com­pet­i­tive teams are too much for all, but the most gifted of ath­letic prodi­gies to bear. So what can be done to help ensure that chil­dren con­tinue to par­tic­i­pate in sports, with­out the fear of injury due to overex­er­tion or psy­cho­log­i­cal break­down due to rig­ors of hyper com­pet­i­tive teams? Instead of com­pletely ded­i­cat­ing chil­dren to one sport for them to par­tic­i­pate in, allow them to par­tic­i­pate in a vari­ety of sports. From a phys­i­cal stand­point the vari­ety of the sports will help ensure that not one por­tion of the body is stressed too much to the point in which an injury is likely to occur. On the psy­cho­log­i­cal front the vari­a­tion of sports will keep each sport “fresh” and “new” as they rotate between sports. Let’s also con­sider the myr­iad of life lessons that a vari­ety of sports will bring to chil­dren as opposed to that of a sin­gle sport. There’s no way that a child involved in an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic sport like swim­ming can learn the value of team work. How­ever, a child involved in foot­ball, swim­ming, and base­ball could learn the value of team­work from foot­ball, develop dis­ci­pline and sports­man­ship from base­ball, and prac­tice the con­di­tion­ing habits instilled by swim­ming. This is not to say that a sin­gle sport can­not teach all of these aspects, how­ever a myr­iad of sports devel­ops these attrib­utes to a far more com­pre­hen­sive and greater degree. In the end of the day, what is the true pur­pose of youth sports? Con­stantly train­ing with the intent of even­tu­ally mak­ing mil­lions of dol­lars, or the devel­op­ment of sound life lessons which will be imper­a­tive for suc­cess later in life?