On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, I learned a valuable lesson. I was late to my freshman student-athlete orientation. The presentation started at 7:30 AM and I arrived at about 7:40 AM. At the time, a man was talking to all freshman student athletes. I later found out that I had missed Julien speak about valuable information. Of course, like any other teenager, I had a reason for being late. I didn't handle the situation that I was put under the appropriate way. But that is not an excuse for being late. There is no excuse for being late and I do realize that. In the future, I will be sure to handle all circumstances that may come up better and I will always be on time for every event I have to attend.
My soccer coach always says to my team "being on time is late and being early is on time." He always stresses to be early and if a person is late, there will be consequences. That morning, he told us to be there early and I failed to do so. I let many people down by my actions including my coach, my teammates, and myself. But after I sat down and thought about the day more, I disappointed a lot of other people and gave a bad first impression of myself to the staff.
First of all, being late is flat out rude and disrespectful to everyone. It was disrespectful to Julien because I missed is whole speech, disrespectful to my teammates, disrespectful to the audience because I interrupted, and rude to the person who was at the time speaking. My lateness was especially disrespectful to Julien and I later went up to him and apologized and asked him what information I missed. I put myself in their position and if I were talking to a group of people and someone walked in late, I would have been very upset. I would think of them as being rude. Now, I will always have to work to gain their respect back towards me. I am the type of person who hates it when people don't like me in some way, so this is really important to me.
