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Thanks for all the help!

Alright, so a few things:

1). Overall I like the sentiment that your PS conveys.So often sports stories are just that--stories about the sport--but this one is much deeper and much more personal. That's a definite strength of this piece. The tone is good. You aren't cocky about your abilities and you wrote your statement with a vulnerability that I think the adcomms will appreciate.

2). With that said, I feel like organization is something that could be improved. There are several parts of your piece that cause me a great deal of confusion, specifically because they feel misplaced or out of order. For example, you're outside the football office at the beginning of your PS waiting to quit, but later in the PS you're sitting on a curb. It causes me to lose focus of where it is that you are. Be consistent with the location. Also, the comments about what football means to you. You list a lot of things at the beginning, but at the bottom somehow fairness is the quintessential lesson you've learned. Something about that doesn't fit with everything else in your PS. I dno how we get to fairness. Also, you switch time a lot. You go into memories, then thought patterns, and it's hard to follow at times. Be sure that where you're placing information is where it should be placed. Specifically the two paragraphs that start "my commitment to fairness" and "throughout (one word, btw) my life" cause me to become rather confused.

3). While reading this I'm actually more interested in your trouble in high-school/grades. I feel like you overcoming that with football is far more substantial than you deciding not to quit the sport just because you didn't feel you were as good at it. To some degree, quitting because you are upset that your talent isn't where it should be is superficial. Especially when you have this whole host of other situations regarding you and your family background. The latter is much more compelling to me and I feel it probably would let me understand who you are better than this story.

4). Which brings me to another question, did you really almost quit just because you weren't as good at football? I was waiting for you to find out you had some kind of weird sickness or a legitimate reason as to why you physically could not play the sport anymore. When that never came, something was lost on me as a reader. I didn't really empathize with you anymore. That's probably something you don't want to have happen.

Anyway, hope these thoughts helped. Good luck!

Spell out numbers. its is seven not 7.

I like it, my personal statement is also a sports allegory. Organization can use some work, and in the 5th paragraph, you write "effect change" where it should be "affect change."

The above poster is incorrect; OP you are correct in writing "effect change" in that context. ("Affect change" has a meaning different than that intended by OP.)

Paragraph One: "the only brothers I'd ever have." Are you dead & speaking from the afterlife ? If not, then you need to change this sentence.

Paragraph Five: Through-out or throughout, not through out.

Final Paragraph: "I like to think that I passed." Not "liked".

Paragraph Four: What is an "amounts" ?

Overall, this a solid law school PS, in my opinion, even though the structure & organization could, and should, be a bit tighter.

jcm043 wrote:Spell out numbers. its is seven not 7.

Thanks. I always forget to do that.

CanadianWolf wrote:Paragraph One: "the only brothers I'd ever have." Are you dead & speaking from the afterlife ? If not, then you need to change this sentence.

I'm, perhaps ineffectively, trying to get across that, having no biological brothers, my teammates were like substitutes. I'll work on the phrasing, it does have an obituary feel.

Thanks for the comments, everyone. It's been really helpful.

CanadianWolf wrote:The above poster is incorrect; OP you are correct in writing "effect change" in that context. ("Affect change" has a meaning different than that intended by OP.)

My bad, I was taught "effect" is never to be used as a verb but see the exception of "effect" meaning "to bring about."

Your intention was to state: " the only brothers that I've ever had."

In the first paragraph, I don't think you need an apostrophe in Cowboys. Good luck!

Last paragraph, you write "to distant to grasp." Should be "too distant to grasp."