When I went to high school, my most passionate desire was to be a professional baseball player. But something within me told me that was not going to happen.
I started recording in my sophomore year in high school. I recorded things on my cell phone in my basement.
I guess what I'd like to say is that people in Sierra Leone are human beings, just like Americans. They want to send their kids to school; they want to live in peace; they want to have their basic rights of life just like everyone else. I think we all owe an obligation to support people who want to do that.
My whole life, I've felt like I can do anything on the basketball court, from playing point guard in high school to having to play center one year in high school, doing everything in college and going through different roles in Philadelphia.
I worked as an intern. I worked at a high school. I worked at a college newspaper while I was taking 18 credits while on the basketball team.
In high school I was on the basketball team, but the coach did something I didn't dig and the next day he looked up and saw me practising with the football team.
I coach my daughter's softball and basketball team. We go to all the school functions. We go out to eat at night and take the kids to the movies. We try to be as normal as we can.
I tried out for my basketball team every year and I never made it. You had to buy the shoes before you knew if you were on the team because it took a few weeks for them to ship. I bought the shoes every year, never once made the team, had a ton of high school basketball shoes.
My maternal grandmother was a star on her high school basketball team in small-town Mississippi.
The height of my athletic achievement was in 8th grade when I was the point guard for my Jewish day school basketball team. We played in a public school league and, amazingly, went undefeated. I say 'amazingly' because our power forward was 5 ft. 6 in.
I was in the chorus in high school, not a soloist. I was on the basketball team. I was in modern dance, part of the group. I was a cheerleader, part of the group. I played the violin, part of the orchestra. I never wanted to be out there alone. Ever.
The young Obama's lack of playing time on the high school basketball team was due more to his ability than the coach's preference for white players.
I played baseball, was on the basketball team in high school, did crew at Hofstra, and randomly played ultimate frisbee, too. But none of the organized teams I was on were anywhere near as competitive as the games on the street.
Sports were a big part of my life. I was the captain of the basketball team in high school, and captain of the basketball team at Princeton.
Later in high school, I met Hillel Slovak, who was the original guitar player of the Chili Peppers, and we became really close. We had a band, and we didn't like the bass player, so I started playing bass, and I got a bass two weeks later.
When I was ten years old, I would get up at 5 in the morning, cycle to the swimming baths, do an hour-and-a-half session, then cycle to school, do a day at school, then cycle back to the baths after.
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
Every time I hear a politician mention the word 'stimulus,' my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.
I have no idea what my batting average was in high school, but I know it wasn't below .450, and that's pretty good hitting where I come from.
I grew up watching MTV, when Journey was huge, when Pat Benatar had 'Love Is a Battlefield,' and my friends and I used to cut school to watch this woman in the video. We loved Pat Benatar.
