A first-person account of one young man's quest to make his high school basketball team, navigating the challenges of punch drills, and a belligerent coach, and countless "suicides" to earn his spot among the finalists ? but will his training, his perseverance, and his faith be enough to help him prevail?

This coming-of-age story takes the reader day by day through this "hell week" and the attending range of emotions, from the highest and purest of expectations, to steadily tumbling into discouragement and disillusionment, before ultimately ending in redemption.

As Peter has described it, "I wrote this piece some forty years after my own encounter with high school basketball tryouts, during an equally difficult period for me in which, even as an adult, I found myself relying on those same lessons learned way back then ? and, in so doing, everything about that earlier time came back to me as vividly as if I were living through it all again."

Tryouts is about never losing sight of who you are, and appreciating that a difficult journey could lead to a place you perhaps belonged all along.