Broken

A year ago I would never have thought that I would be in the same position or be even remotely the same person that I am today. Before the summer of 2012 my entire life was based around basketball. Basketball was not just a sport to me, it was more like a lifestyle. Everything that I did had to do with playing, watching, thinking, or coaching basketball. This is not a totally healthy lifestyle because it caused my mood to reflect the outcome of how I did that day in my game or practice. I recognized that this lifestyle wasn’t totally healthy, however I enjoyed it because it brought a lot of attention to me since I was very good. Basketball also began to become like a trait that some used to define me as a person. An example of this was when my new neighbors with a son in my grade at the public school in my town came to my house and immediately saw me and said “You’re Zack Goldman, the basketball prodigy”, and laughed. Although this was an obvious exaggeration it shows the real type of the one definition aspect that was put on me.

During the summer of 2012, right after I came home from a two month summer training facility in Florida, an event happened that forever changed my life and started a new chain of events to occur; I broke my foot. When I returned home from Florida I went strait to a school practice the next day, eager to show off my new skills. In the school practice the team was doing a one on one defensive drill when suddenly I felt a pop in my foot and pain that started to gradually worsen. At first I didn’t think much of the pain, however after trying to play through the pain for the next half hour I realized that something was seriously wrong and that I needed to stop practicing. After returning home and icing my foot for about an hour I recognized that this was no sprain or temporary injury. It was then that it hit me that my journey back to basketball was going to be just that, a journey. The next couple months that followed included severe pain, trips to multiple doctors across the country, and extremely frustrating inconclusive/contradicting diagnoses by every doctor that I saw.

By the time that school started I was a mess mentally and in a cast up to my knee due to the last doctor who wanted to “try something” because he had nothing else in mind. The worst part of the whole experience was getting told be each and every doctor dates when my foot should have healed, and passing each of those dates, one by one, with a foot that was no better than it was before. This was all unbelievable mentally taxing and I began to become depressed and recognized that I would be missing the entire basketball season. The stress that my foot was putting on me mentally was too much to deal with and I therefore told my parents that I couldn’t deal with the kind of lifestyle that I had been living and had to have a new start. This resulted in my parents and I frantically looking for something that I could do with my semi-broken foot for the second semester of junior year. I also was determined to repeat my junior year so I could get some time to set in my new personality and look at life in general.

My parents and I kept coming up blank in our search for a non-physical program that was willing to accept a second semester junior who wanted to repeat junior year. We also faced some trouble getting permission from the school to repeat junior year. Finally my parents and I found one program that did something that I never in my life had a desire to so, spend a semester of high school in Israel. I never really felt proud of my heritage as Jewish or even really ever liked or cared about the religion. I was however willing to do anything to get my one missed basketball season back.

I never imagined how great of an outcome that my semester in Israel would have on me. The trip and particularly the people on it who became my best friends gave me a whole new perspective on life and made me realize how truly big and diverse the world really is. After returning home from the trip I had a totally new attitude, new things I wanted to try, new best friends, and most importantly a new view of what could make me happy or upset and a new perspective on everything.