Fun fact #7 (the final one)

Yeah yeah, I know, I'm late with this one too. More on that in a minute.

Fun fact #7: When I was a kid, I had very little confidence in my athletic ability. A lot of this stems from an incident that happened when I was 7 or 8 years old: I wanted to play softball, but there were too many kids that signed up and not enough teams--so the coaches held tryouts (!) to cut down on the number of kids. Of course, since I had never played softball before, I didn't make the team, and I felt so bad about myself that I swore I'd never try to play softball again. Luckily, I got brave enough about 5 years later and decided to try again...and this time, I got to play.

This affected how I played other sports too. I took tennis lessons as a kid, and at the end of my first summer my tennis teacher wanted me to enter a local tournament. I remember panicking---I wasn't good enough to play!---and making up an excuse ("my parents won't let me"), because I was afraid I'd fail and look stupid.

Fortunately, this fear of failing at sports has not followed me into adulthood---I now play (and enjoy playing) sports, and I enjoy being somewhat athletic.