Personal Narrative Essay

How to Achieve the Team Goal

I joined the baton twirling club for six years when I was in junior high and high school. The baton twirling club is one of the largest scale clubs in my school. Approximately there were more than 100 members in my school. When we were in junior high school, we were just able to have fun to participate in the club. However, high school is a competitive environment because we entry the contest. If we can win in the local contest, we are allowed to participate in the national competition. Our team participates in the national competition every year. Therefore, our goal is to receive the gold award and be ranked in upper level in the competition.

Sadly, we could not get the gold award when I was a sophomore in high school. It was the silver award. It was extremely regretful and I felt that all this effort for nothing! For a while, I lose my drive because everything seemed vanity and hopeless. However, I noticed that such a way of thinking is exactly wasting time because new one year for the next national competition has already started. Therefore, we decided new goal that was to devote everything for the team and to win the first prize in the national competition. We thought that setting the highest aim so we will be able to have strong motivation. Since then, our practice became quite hard like six or seven days a week. We were always in a lot of pressure because the regular members were often changed with supporting members if someone could not perform well or drop the baton. Therefore, we could get the mental strength overcoming the tension. Moreover, especially in my case, keeping the balance between my club and studying was really difficult because I decided to take ICU entrance exams. I sometimes almost lost my confidence to enter ICU. However, I did not want to give up because entering ICU was my dream since I was a freshman in high school. Overcoming various difficulties, we finally could receive the gold award and be ranked in third level in the competition. It was the best results in history of my club. We all satisfied with the result and it became the best memory in my high school life.

I think whether we could get the good result or not depends on the team work. The team when I was a sophomore was not closely bound together beyond the wall of grades. Therefore, we could not completely trust each other and it might be seemed in the performance. Based on this reflection, we try to communicate with everyone as much as possible to share the feeling when we became the third year student. Particularly, the comrades were really close. It is not too much to say that we spent much time than families. The strong bonds of friendships are important to achieve the same goal.

In addition, I learned that the confidence on the real stage is created by the practice. If I do my best in the usual practice, I can do the same thing in the real stage. I realized the importance of the attitude for the practice; the practice should be like the real stage and the real stage should be like the practice. Furthermore, having a good imagination and strongly believing myself are also important. I always did the image training of the perfect performance. And when I was dancing I kept reminding myself “I can do it, I can do it.” By doing those things, there was just confidence and no more anxiety in my mind.

Now, I join in the cheerleading club in ICU. Therefore, I would like to utilize the abilities acquired through this experience when I was in the high school.