A comprehensive memoir of my football journey. Starting with how it all began....
Over the 20 years I’ve been playing football, since peewee bantam where I was 1 pound overweight and forced to wear a red stripe that indicated I wasn't allowed to carry the ball, the single most recurring thought I’ve always had is this.......
“How the f*** did I end up here?”
It’s crude, and the exact meaning of that phrase would vary between exasperation, frustration, and joyful disbelief depending on the situation, but it honestly was how I felt! I’m not here to BS you with dopey inspirational poster-esque garbage. I’m going to be honest with how I see or saw things in my way, weird, slightly crude and jokingly (sometimes at least) nihilistic since it would betray the entire point of this post and blog as a whole if I didn’t.
The earliest memories I have are as a destructive 4 year old, whose only means of being placated was either sneaking through our neighbor’s doggy door to play their Super Nintendo while they weren’t home or running head first into our living room TV until it cracked. I even got kicked out of multiple day-cares for violent tendencies! Clearly I needed some form of outlet, and my sisters, being athletes themselves, suggested sports. So, into the local youth football league I went!
And I f***ing sucked! I was drafted 2nd to last in the league and would start crying the second I was hit slightly too hard. Clearly I was the quintessential bully who could dish it but not take it! I would ride back home in the car in full pads because I’d be so miserable and traumatized. Our longtime neighbor Brian Lister, in his miraculously prophetic vision, kept convincing my parents that I'd get it eventually. Little would we know how right he would be! Somehow in spite of me our team managed to win the youth league outright! Now granted, this early in your playing days the end result doesn’t matter so much as instilling a joy and passion for the game, but at this point I’d rather have been playing Pokémon Blue on my Kiwi game boy that I’d proceed to lose in Mexico and refuse to ever visit again for that sole reason to this day.
Unlike a lot of my friends, I didn’t exactly have a love of sports ingrained in me from a mom or dad who were diehard fans (They are your typical fair weather Dallas Cowboys fans). They were too busy working countless hours in order to support our family, to the point effectively my sisters were the ones who were raising me. My love for the game would be either from osmosis from my friends from school being big sports fans (I did grow up in the football Mecca of Texas after all) or self-taught, staying up late to watch Monday Night Football and watching shows like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption after school every day (which also lead to my interest in sports journalism!).
Fast forwarding to high school, I wasn’t exactly in the best of places. I had gotten demoted from freshman A team to B mid-season. My well documented gaming habits may have started to become detrimental to both football and school. I was effectively an only child at this point since both of my sisters had gone off to college. I just wasn’t in a great spot mentally and felt aimless. After sophomore year ended, I had seriously considered quitting football altogether thinking it was pointless to continue. It wasn’t until a man named Joe McBride, who was our incoming new head coach at Coppell High School, sat me down in his office and told me what he expected of me. Looking back, it may have been the singular point in which the track of my life was completely altered, and I dread to think what my life would have been had that meeting never happened
Coach McBride was tough, extremely tough. The expectations put on me were something I don’t think had ever been placed on me in any facet of my life up to that point. Just doing the bare minimum was not going to cut it with this guy, as I had to learn the hard way multiple times by getting my ass chewed out for being a baby. But even in the face of all that, you never got the impression he was doing it merely to cover his own ass and that he genuinely cared for you as a person.
Ultimately, going into junior year it seemed like I would be a backup on varsity. But then, unexpectedly a week or so before our first game, one of our tackles went down for the year. One of the numerous dominoes on this path I’ve walked that may have totally altered the trajectory of my life. Suddenly I found myself as the starting right tackle after not even being a few months removed from quitting altogether. Soul crushing anxiety aside, turns out I wasn’t all that bad. Between excellent coaching and the innate natural athleticism I had, I started all 13 games we played, up to a loss vs Arlington in the 3rd round of state playoffs
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During spring football the following year, I received my first full ride offer to play college football from Towson University. As a naive 17-year-old, I didn’t exactly realize the weight of what that meant from my future, but now I very much do and I'm thankful for it every waking day. Soon more offers began to flow in over time. Louisiana Tech, Memphis, UTEP, even Service Academies were just to name a few. Some bigger names were even potentially interested in me as a defensive tackle, although that never really materialized after I suffered a concussion a couple days after coach McBride attempted this himself! Eventually, midway through senior year I was contacted by coach Luke Wells, who was currently the TE coach for Iowa State. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I still to this day feel especially bad for shutting myself in my room to play World of Warcraft after an especially rough day of practice when he came to visit in person. A few days later Iowa State had extended an offer, and a week after I had taken an official visit, I pulled the trigger and accepted. A year and a half ago I was considering dropping the sport altogether, now I was about to have my future education paid for thanks to it. A single decision completely altered the course of my life, what else could’ve been responsible for that other than favor from God. After an eventful senior year that ended as of this writing the best finish in Coppell High school history in regional finals, taking the #1 HS team in the country to the brink in Euless Trinity, the following summer I was off to Ames, Iowa to begin the next chapter of my life.
(Part 1 of 3)