By AILEEN JANEE CORPUS

I’ve played basketball throughout all of high school, and I’ve been cooking in the kitchen since middle school. Both of these aspects in my life have helped me approach life and appreciate all of the different experiences I have faced on and off the basketball court/kitchen. (AILEEN JANEE CORPUS/ Ethic News Photo)

Playing basketball is like running a kitchen. 

For those who know neither or a little bit of either experience, allow me to elaborate: both activities heavily rely on communication. Without communication, a player does not know when to make a screen or the sous chef does not know how much more time is needed to cook scallops.

From my experience, communication is in our daily lives, and, as my AP English Language teacher beautifully put it, “Communication is both talking and listening.” 

In a drill that we had learned over the summer by another team, it focused on shooting, passing and most importantly, communication. While there were at least five people on the three-point line shooting threes, there were three rebounders in the middle of the key dishing out the ball for the shooters to continue their job. Where the communication comes in is when the balls come through the hoop after the shooters shoot, and rebounders must communicate to shooters so other rebounders do not end up passing to the same shooter and hitting the shooter with one to many balls.

While watching an episode of “Hell’s Kitchen” with my family, I noticed how either the red team or blue team crumbled if simply one chef kept to themselves and did not communicate with the other chefs on the process of their dish. This can cause too many or not enough dishes to be produced or a dish to be over or under cooked.

Like in my team’s basketball drill, if even one individual decides to not communicate with the other team, then it can cause everyone to crumble. At times, the heat on the court or kitchen can be overwhelming because of all the different components on either battlefield including too many people shouting at each other on what to do. The heat that can be felt on these battlefields can also be felt in life. 

Sometimes it feels like doing everything at the same time can get more done, but I’ve found it’s actually the opposite because when I try to tackle every objective, I get “lost in the sauce,” as I like to say, and I end up even more stressed than when I came into the situation.

When I find myself overwhelmed in life, I write down what I need to do, which allows me to see what I am doing and attack one obstacle at a time so I can get the satisfaction of crossing out items on my to-do list.

By stepping back from the situation or court or kitchen, you can look at the obstacle from the grand scheme of things and see that life or courts or kitchens are more similar than you might realize.