Sports play a significant role in the culture of the United States. Whether it's hitting a homerun on a hot summer day or getting tackled while trying to catch a football, young athletes never forget their early memories of learning how to play a sport. While learning how to play a sport can come natural and be pleasant to many children, the moment I learned how to play basketball was much different. It all started during the beginning of eighth grade. I had just made friends with Nikola, a classmate who is now one of my best friends. Every day we would go to the library during homeroom so we could finish our homework together. One day we finished our home work early, so we began to talk about a poster on the library wall next to the desktops. The poster said in big bold letters “Open Gym” with a picture of our school’s basketball team from last year. While I had never played a minute of basketball in my life, my friend Nikola, on the other hand, was a starter on the basketball team last year. Nikola was explaining how he thought that this year the basketball team was planning to do the same as the year past, and he wanted me to go to open gym to practice with him. I told Nikola I was not the best at basketball and that I really did not want to go, but he persisted and in the end Nikola convinced me to go. The same day I decided to go to open gym to practice basketball with Nikola, I remember asking my mother to purchase me brand new basketball shoes. When the weekend finally rolled along I felt great about playing basketball during open gym, I had a new pair of Nike basketball shoes and one of the team’s best players on my side. I recall walking into the gym and seeing many students I did not know. Each one of the students was bigger and taller than myself, still I was feeling hopeful. Then the first game of the open gym initiated, and then I realized I was not good at all at playing basketball. I was uninterested and did no