Ninja Warrior Father

Author's Note: In writing, we had to write a personal narrative for evaluation. The catch is it can't be like a whole trip, it has to be about something that happened on the trip like snorkling in Hawaii or something like that. My story is a seed of when my family went to Eagle River, which happened on the volleyball court...


The smell of pine trees wafting up to the volleyball court in Eagle River always makes the day. The volleyball court sits right next to a huge 60 foot pine tree with needles tumbling down on the sand below. Occasionally, the ball would get wedged in a petite branch, or somewhere we could reach with our hands.

My brother gets mad every once in a while, and takes it out on and object or a person. This time it was the volleyball. He punted the volleyball as high as he could getting it welded to the highest branch in the tree. Our first thought was to throw a football or basketball at it, but that only caused to have the football and basketball get stuck up in the tree as well. My dad has always wanted to be on American Ninja Warrior, a show where all the best physically strong people in America come to tackle the world's hardest obstacle course. Now, this isn't like Wipeout where you have some fat guy crashing on the big balls; these guys actually try and succeed. My dad is an enormous fan of the show after being introduced to it by one of his friends. He imagines that he could go on the show and win the half a million dollars for us, prove that he is still strong at 45. When he saw the ball stuck, he jumped at the opportunity to climb the tree and get the ball out of the skew of needles. My mom couldn't watch because she was so frightened that he was going to fall and wound himself in any way.

The easy part was getting up the tree. The hard part was jerking the branch hard enough to knock the ball down.  Eventually, after a few shots, the ball fell down, and hit my sister right in the head, plunging her to the ground. She was crying but I was laughing inside.  My dad started his way down, taking each step with special care not to scare my mom. His feet touched the ground; my siblings ran over to hug him as they were also worried.

After the whole shenanigan, my dad started bragging about how he might be the strongest 45 year old to ever live.  He was saying that he should go on American Ninja Warrior at that very moment and see how he could do. Now, everyone has imagination; my dad has no small one and I like that about him. He's taught me if that you work hard you can get anything done.