Finalist: “Behind The Scenes” by Kyle Carlesimo

Kyle Carlesimo of The St. Thomas More School (CT)

When a team is up 11 points in the third quarter of a high school basketball game, they’re expected to win. It does not matter if it is the state quarterfinal, or the other team has the number player in the country and projected top 3 pick in the draft.

Losing the last game of the season in overtime is one of the worst feelings an athlete could have. That pain is multiplied when you have the ball in your hands with the game on the line, and you do not even have a chance to win the game because you are intentionally fouled right before you shoot. That pain is amplified even further when the entire world shuts down for a pandemic days later, and basketball is seemingly put on hold indefinitely.

After spending days on end thinking about what my team and I could have won differently to win the game, and after making the final score of the game my screensaver so I saw it a hundred times every day, my mindset about the pandemic began to change.

I began to view the pandemic as an opportunity to put so much work in behind the scenes, that people would not be able to recognize me as the same player. My life in the pandemic was very repetitive, much like everyone else in the world at the time, however the amount of work that was being put in was not being replicated at all. One main thing that I needed to improve was to make my body more college ready, so I lifted 5 days a week and put on 25 pounds over the course of the year.

I was fortunate enough to have access to a gym where I could workout, and a basketball court where I worked out with my trainer 7 days a week of months on end. By the time the world had righted itself enough to have my senior basketball season, I felt like I was beyond ready. The hard work paid off, as I set basically every school 3-point shooting record in my senior year as I helped lead my team to the league championship, defeating the same team that knocked us out the year before.

From a team aspect, we were at the top of the mountain. With the state tournament not allowed to be played still, we had won everything we could. However, individually, I was nowhere near where I wanted to be. I wanted to be, and truly believed that I was a division 1 basketball player, yet all I had was 1 D-3 offer.

While I was grateful for the opportunity, I knew I had more in me: I bet on myself and enrolled in a post-graduate year at St. Thomas More in Connecticut, thousands of miles away from home in Seattle. After dealing with injuries for much of the preseason, I began the year coming off of the bench. Where others might have been discouraged, I was unbothered. I kept working, earning more playing time and eventually working my way into the starting lineup. From that point on, I felt like I was in a zone.

I was playing the best basketball of my life, and as the season continued to progress I felt as if I was continuing to improve. Despite ending the year as the second leading scorer in the best prep school league in the country, I still had no official D-1 offers. So when I got my first call that a program and coaching staff wanted me and was offering me a scholarship, it felt as if the weight of the world had been lifted off my back. All the hard work that I put in was not put to waste. Betting on myself paid off. And now that I have an opportunity at Eastern Illinois, I am not going to waste it.