The Declaration to Athletes by Allie Steinberg

In the course of a human life, it is important for one to take control of one’s life, and live it to the fullest through athletic ability and performance, while the laws and whistle blows of sports may maintain your games, the voices of joints and muscles shall not hold you back, so it must be declared that there be a separation between the strains of the game and our enjoyment of the game.

The expeditious movement of this fine tuned game has no room for the awkward pusillanimous; it only has room for the unbelievable audaciously strong. But every person has an unalienable right to pursue their happiness, and to play the sports they want to play by not being oppressed by the absolute despotic rulers who are the sprained ankles, the strained muscles, the concussions, and the stress fractures. They rule your level of play, limiting you to never reach the best of your abilities. These injuries have no right to bring you down, but you and everyone else has the right to fight back through a well planned pre-game warm-up and an extreme session of deep stretching. When the right such as the ones to sweat your heart out, run until you collapse, and slide tackle until your knees go bloody are deprived of you by the others, your right to feeling freedom in your own life is abolished and you have a right to proclaim your liberty, defining the separating between you and the painful feeling in your ankles.

We cannot be deprived of that feeling of a perfect swish, or when a ball hits the sweet spot on your foot; this in turn would be a cruel violation of our rights done by our own bodies, who although were and still are our associates, can be seen as tyrannical inner forces, trying to crush our individual independence by blocking that last shot of hope at the buzzer, that last pass that surely would have assisted independence, and that last throw that would have given a touchdown to attain happiness.