Holland Tech Vignette: Episode 5

**Names have been changed for privacy reasons**

This wasn’t an experience I wanted to have in my life. I wanted everything to go as planned which was for me and my friends to have a good basketball team to take on challenges and face our fears. I always wanted to join the basketball team to see how it would feel because all my friends would be in it, and at the time I kind of liked basketball.

Days and weeks went by, and we really wanted a basketball team. At the time we didn’t have a coach, so we had to ask around and ask the principal if he could get us a coach because we really wanted to play. We also wanted a girl coach. No one could find us a coach, so we decided to ask Mr. Langston if he would be our coach. He agreed. It started well, we had a big team and practiced when we had gym class. We didn’t know we would regret this decision with our lives as things became more intense. 

We were not having as much fun as we thought because we were just kids and didn’t need all this pain and stress on us, but according to Mr. Langston, this was all a part of basketball. Soon enough, we had it. We were getting other adults and the head principals involved because we were so done with all the pain and torture, and we just wanted a better start to everything. Every time we went to school, we were forced to do things we didn’t want to do and play when we didn’t wanna play. If we didn’t comply we were booted off the team or benched when games came around. 

One day, my friends and I came to school, and we all ran as fast as we could to our head administrator, Mr. Hill. We all loved Mr. Hill and had a great relationship with him. He always gave us great advice and was always there for us when we needed him. In this situation, he was there for us more than ever. He had his own group in the summer apart from ours and we all wanted to join his group badly. We were with all our other friends from different grades and were with a big group of people because all we wanted was fun. So we went to him, and he said we could join, and we told him we didn’t wanna be with Mr. Langston anymore because we were stressed and couldn’t handle it. It then all came to an end, and we were no longer being coached by Mr. Langston. I didn’t even want to play basketball anymore after that. My friends eventually stopped, too. But the relief was worth it. We had our freedom, our happiness back.