Life is funny sometimes...

This may sound like a tired lesson to some of you, but something that I found out about yesterday really put things in perspective and made me do some thinking. I was chatting with my old teammate/roommate, Sasha, online when she congratulated me for being recognized as an ITA(Intercollegiate Tennis Association) Scholar-Athlete for achieving above a 3.5 GPA in the last academic year. On top of that, our team as a whole was named to the ITA All-academic team for earning a cumulative team GPA of 3.2. Both of these are things that I hadn't been able to achieve throughout my initial 4 years of college. I'm not normally one to shout to the world about my achievements, but I felt like it would be worth while to reflect on what this means in the overall scheme of things. When I got thinking further, I realized that a little over a year ago I was probably at one of, if not THE, lowest points in my life. The passing of my Dad and tearing my ACL in the same year was a brutal reality. At the time, I thought a lot about how cruel life could be. Well, here I am a year and a half later with a very opposite outlook on life. Not only did I get to come back to Penn State and play an extra year of tennis because of a rule that happened to be changed the year I got hurt, but I accomplished more in this past year than I had in the previous 4. I earned the #1 spot on my team, I got much more involved with the community and school organizations, I won the True Grit award (selected from over 800 student-athletes), and I had my best year academically, earning recognition for it. Thinking about this really made me smile. It also made me realize that if things hadn't gotten so bad, I probably wouldn't have appreciated everything that has happened in the past year. It is a lesson I have learned before and it's probably a lesson I will learn again....sometimes things have to get really bad in order for them to get really good!

If you want to read the article about the ITA awards click here!