Aiden Morris '23 Recruiting Profile

In this brief essay I am going to talk about the trials and tribulations that I had to go through as a student athlete to spark my personal growth, find my passion, and acquire a new understanding of myself as a human being.

I live in a small mountain town west of Denver and attend a charter school in Denver called D’Evelyn Jr/Sr High School (DHS). D’Evelyn, ranked #1 in Colorado and 42^nd in the country, is not any ordinary high school. The strenuous STEM curriculum requires substantial amounts of grit and hard work to succeed. Due to how difficult DHS is, students start at 7th grade to develop the skillset needed to succeed there. I came from a small middle school in Colorado that had at the maximum fifteen minutes of homework a night. At DHS it is two to three hours on average. My first week at D’Evelyn as a seventh grader I thought I would not be able to make it. I had never been pushed so hard academically in my life. As the years went on, 8th and 9th grade contained the same amount of stress and homework, and then at the end of 9th grade a new virus spread throughout the world called Coronavirus. I remember emptying my locker of all of my books and going home, not knowing what was going to happen next. Online school was unlike regular school in so many ways and it made education drastically harder for me since I am a hands-on learner. I couldn't get the true one-on-one help that I needed to thrive in my education. It was very easy to become distracted sitting in my room on the same video calls every day for 8 hours. But I did find my passion during this time which was the financial markets. I became fascinated in how world politics and current events could have such drastic changes on economic markets. I started reading financial books for fun. I found it interesting how everything was connected and that the economies often ran on emotion rather than facts. Though the pandemic seemed like it was never going to end I did like learning outside of the traditional school methods. I was excited to see all of my friends and restart my education, but little did I know that it was going to be the two hardest years of my life. Going back to school, although exciting, was very difficult for me because I had found what I was passionate about, and it wasn’t chemistry, physics, or calculus. Additionally, as an athlete I had to find a way to balance the necessary attention to the academic rigors of DHS, my leadership in Fellowship of Christian Athletes, the hours of homework, three hours of practice every night and the 30-minute drive I had each way. Most days I would wake up at 5 a.m. to be at my school at 6 a.m. to study with my teachers to understand the material I needed. Often, I would not be home until after 7 from practice and then have to put a few hours of homework in. What I learned about myself through all of these challenges is that regardless of how difficult something is I can always succeed at whatever I do as long as I work hard, put in the time and effort, and most importantly never give up!!