GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — In a hallway outside the north gym at Forest Hills Northern High School was the place I first met Ari James. This high school junior had a full day planned. We had a 4 p.m. interview scheduled around the time of year when winter sports are wrapping up, and spring sports are beginning. Because of that, she had just enough time to do the interview between track practice and basketball practice.
I get the feeling that the busy day I saw Ari having was just one of many. Aside from athletics, she's also a member of the orchestra and she's on the Michigan Department of Education's Student Advisory Council for Anti-Racism.
"She's an outstanding student-athlete that really has her priorities in order and is really unbelievably self-assured in everything that she does," said Forest Hills Northern girls basketball coach Jim Sprague.
But self-assured isn't an adjective Ari would probably use to describe the person she was during her freshman year. Among other things, she says she was insecure about her self-image and her ability to play basketball.
"I'm relatively new to basketball. I only started playing when I was in seventh grade, and I don't have much of a natural talent for it," she said.
What happened during a game at another school that year is something Ari describes as "the worst-case scenario" for the mental state she was in at the time.
"It was a really tough game. Nobody's shots were going up. I had gotten to the free throw line and I had completely missed two shots. And I didn't know until a few days after the game, but somebody had recorded the video of me bricking two shots and uploaded it to Instagram," she said.
"It hurt for a long time. Somebody singled me out. I'm the only person that looks like me on the team, so yeah, that was really hard for a long time. That was really tough."
Ari's junior varsity coach at the time had also heard about what happened, and she looped in Coach Sprague and the school's athletic director.
"It was something that we were certainly concerned about a little bit, for how it can affect your psyche as a young, 14-year-old girl," Coach Sprague said.
"I think a lot of kids at that point may have just given up on the fact that they didn't want to play basketball anymore. They didn't want to be on that free-throw line anymore. They didn't want to be part of that where they could have people watching their every move out on the basketball floor. But she didn't let that bother her, and she didn't let that stop her goals and her dreams of continuing to play high school basketball."
Two years later, during another road game, Ari's perseverance paid off when she got to write a new ending to a very similar type of story.
"Same school. Same situation. Same basket. Once I got fouled and the whistle blew, I was thinking 'Oh, this is really happening right now,'" she said.
"It was a much more packed arena than it had been my freshman year. There were so many people there and it had been loud, and I was feeling a lot of different things, but I was able to make both shots and that was a really big moment. I could hear my bench being really excited. I could hear both of my coaches being excited."
But joyous as that occasion was, many of Ari's teammates didn't get the full picture of what that moment meant to her until the team's next practice.
"We got in a big circle and we were talking about a lot of different things from the game as far as what we did well and things we need to work on. We talked specifically about that incident, and I just asked Ari to share that incident with the team. Then you saw the jaws drop and the eyes water." Coach Sprague said.
Ari says she believes sharing the story helped her teammates understand her better.
"My JV coach and my current coach were both very proud of me, and it made me feel really loved as a player, because they were just as emotional as I was," she said.
Ari said the incident was a nightmare for her, and sometimes it hurts to recount what happened. One of the reasons she shared her story with us is because she wants other people who might be experiencing bullying to know they're not alone.
"When it comes to struggling or being made fun of, unfortunately, it's still a really big issue. It's kind of new and different with technology, the ways people can make fun of people," she said.
"When it comes to instances of cyberbullying and being targeted and being made fun of, it's not you. It's the other person. Whatever that person has to say, whatever that person does, that's terrible and that shouldn't happen. It can be extremely frustrating, but you are way more than that. That person is going to be known by their actions. You're going to be known by your perseverance."
We also shared Ari's story with Christy Buck, the executive director of the Mental Health Foundation of West Michigan. She says many people can make it through difficult times, but for many others, it's difficult to face people who are "relentlessly picking on you." She says it's important for parents and friends to know the signs that someone might be experiencing bullying.
"Understand and watch for changes in your child's behavior that might be happening at home, whether it be a loss of appetite, unable to sleep, not wanting to go to school, not doing their homework. All of those things are the first signs that their mental health has been affected," Buck said.
"Let that victim know that I am supporting you. I'm sorry you're having to go through this. Can I help you find some help?"
If you're being bullied and need someone to talk to, you can call 988. That's the number for the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, but it's not reserved only for incidents when someone is having suicidal thoughts. Buck says it is "for people to start up a conservation" with a trained crisis counselor. If you'd prefer to communicate through text messages, you can text "nice" to 741741.
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