A high-school coach gave me a tryout, and a condition attached to it: fifty pounds in two months. That was not a training plan. It was a door that was only ever going to open once.
No middle school wanted me. I was heavy, I was slow, and the schools that recruited basketball players had already made their lists.
So I built a team at a school that did not have one — an open call to anyone who wanted to play, drills I taught myself off the internet, and two years of showing up. At the end of that, the coach at Capital Normal University High School — a traditional basketball school in Beijing — agreed to look at me.
He did not say I was good enough.
He said I would be, at fifty pounds lighter.
The tryout ended with a condition rather than an answer: lose fifty pounds, and the conversation could continue. There was no plan attached, no follow-up date, and no guarantee that doing it would change anything. It was the kind of condition that is easy to treat as a polite no.
I took his drills back to my own team and ran them there. I trained twice a day and ate like it mattered, because for the first time it did.
Two months later the regional tournament came around, and my team — a roster of ordinary students with no recruited athletes on it — beat his middle-school squad. He saw the game. He also saw that the fifty pounds were gone. He signed me after the season.
What I take from it is not the weight. It is that the condition was a filter, and filters are meant to be passed rather than argued with. When someone tells you the exact price of the thing you want, they have already done you a favour.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.