When I was younger, I wanted to be just like my dad. I would try and walk, talk, and do everything like him. One thing he did was snowboard, so the first chance I got, I started to snowboard. He took me to the rental place and we rented a board. The first day I fell a lot and I hated it, but I kept trying and it quickly became my favorite thing. All I wanted to do was snowboard. I was on the snowboard team. My closest friends were on the snowboard team. I couldn’t eat, sleep, or do anything without thinking about snowboarding. My mom would make us ski one day a year and I despised it. But two years ago, I broke my ankle snowboarding, which put me out for the rest of the season. When I returned next season, I had drifted from some of my friends on the team, which made me less inclined to snowboard with the team.

When the winter trip came around in 7th grade, we went telemark skiing. I was a little nervous but was excited to try it. We went up to the Cross, and we skied the whole day in a foot of fresh snow. It was such a great time that when my friends told me that alpine skiing was twice as fun as telemarking, I had to try. When I got home, I told my parents about how fun it was and asked if I could rent skis for a day to try it.

About a week later, I went up on the hill with some friends to learn to ski. I was not that good at first but I got the hang of it after a little while. This does not imply that I was a capable skier yet, but I was having a ton of fun. After that day, I returned the skis, and I begged my parents for skis that I could rent for the rest of the year. Finally, we found a place that would give us a deal since it was halfway through the season. I rented them and I skied that weekend. The next week was the Engl Cup, a competition scavenger hunt between all the color groups at school. It was on the mountain and I didn’t want to slow my team down so I was going to snowboard, but at the last minute, I decided to ski. I was very nervous because I didn’t know a lot of the older kids in my group, but I started to ski and I was able to keep up.

Later, I was with a friend and we were next to a jump, watching kids go off it. It’s not technically a competition but a lot of people treat it like one. I had back flipped the jumps on a snowboard but I wasn’t that good at skiing. I thought about the trip to Africa I was going on with my grandma in two weeks that had been planned for months. I knew I couldn’t get hurt. So instead of not doing the jump, I told myself that I better land it. I did land it, and it is what started my love for skiing. For the rest of that season, I skied every chance I got, and this year I joined the ski team.

Skiing is now one of my favorite sports, even more than snowboarding was. I am very glad that I tried it because if I had a closed mindset I would’ve never found it. I think that the lesson from this story is you can’t predict what’s going to come your way. If you had told ten-year-old me that I would ski as a teenager, he would have laughed and said, “Never in a million years.”

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