Personal Essay / Penn State Application

We speak of basketball in seasons. The same can be said for life, turmoil, COVID, and the world on fire this summer. In June my father helped me create a basketball training camp for kids ages 8-14. We develop a website and I end up with 5 trainees: Joshua is talented for a third grader. Cameron, 13, is quiet but a hard worker. Elijah is 6’2 at 14. He lacks fundamental skills. He’s all arms and legs, but by the end he can dribble with his eyes shut. Zion, 13, is effeminate and shy.  By the time we are done he could shoot well close to the rim. There is Joseph, 12, who gets frustrated easily and I remind him of the importance of staying calm. They are all young black men like me, witnessing their country being torn apart by different opinions on racial injustice issues. I often think to myself, it is hard to know what to make of the protests and riots on television throughout a global pandemic even at age 17. I am glad to help train these kids and serve as a distraction to such a chaotic world around them. One night Joseph writes on Instagram, “Bruh, why is everything so political these days? I just wanna be a kid.”

Herein lies my question: Is there a childhood in 2020? I am trying to figure out what I think for myself amid a blaze of social media where everyone seems to see things so extremely. We fight about wearing masks on the bottom of our faces but sometimes it seems like we are wearing them over our eyes. The reality is, the United States is still far from united. I just had someone recently tell me that the Black Lives Matter movement and christianity don’t coincide. Is everything so mutually exclusive? I tell Joseph to be calm on the court, not to show his frustrations, to think…and then I see the world of grown men and women around him who fail to do so. The world seems to be becoming increasingly more divided as I get older, or maybe I am just witnessing the effects of  a maturing mind. I feel for these younger kids figuring out where they stand in life, what their purpose is, and how they can make an impact. It is difficult when people are pulling you every which way, telling you what is right and what is wrong. For the children of 2020, purity is hard to come by. It was in 1960, too, but the 8 year old was not scrolling through social media with political influences flooding their timeline.

At 17, I am doing what most people my age do: trying to progress from being an old boy to a young man. I think about the country that I love and that I am inheriting, passed on to me by previous generations, and which I will handle one way or another and pass on to Joseph and Joshua, Elijah, and Zion. I know that I am fortunate to have a father, to have an education superior to that offered in segregated times to my grandparents, to have an opportunity to speak freely even if I don’t know what I want to say yet. But in looking at the faces of those boys this summer I realize childhood is a product of something larger than a sum of years: it’s a season conditional on the world you spend it in.

I realize I would like to be a coach someday, perhaps when I am older and wiser and a father. Maybe I will have more answers then for the faces that look up at me reflecting their own confusions about their own generation. I hope it is a simpler time and that people listen to each other, but who can say for certain? Not me.