Camp Winadu Personal Narrative

It all started in the summer of 2010, where I was sent off to Massachusetts for the next seven weeks. I was going to Camp Winadu, which is a summer camp that my dad attended from ages four to nineteen. My Dad and I boarded our flight at O’Hare, and during the whole two hour flight I was nervous about being away from my parents for almost two months. Adding even more onto my nerves, I was the only camper that wasn’t from the East Coast. After we landed, I was whisked away in a van (in a good way), and taken through the rural parts of New York and Massachusetts that I never knew existed. When I arrived, everyone was playing basketball on the court by the lake. Most of the kids knew each other, but I knew nobody. I was a stray dog. Everyone hung around for a few hours before we were sent to our cabins, where I of course knew nobody. Something else that I also didn’t know was that Winadu was an ultra-competitive sports camp.
All of the campers at Camp Winadu were extremely competitive and type a people, and I was the exact opposite. Although I am athletic and good at all of the sports we were forced to play everyday in temperatures over 100 degrees, I got picked last in many of the games, which was demoralizing and made me feel vulnerable and like and outsider. I was picked on for being new to
The varsity coach turns tennis into a job and responsibility, and sucks out all of the joy of playing tennis. The varsity team is very competitive and I feel that being on the team would make me miserable playing tennis instead of having fun, which is the normal motivation for me to play and get better. Another impact that Camp Winadu has had on me is that it thickened my skin and made it harder for mean people to get into my