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Monday, April 29, 2019

Fishing Report for Alabama Bass Trail on Weiss Lake: 34th Place Finish

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First, let me apologize for having to re-use a picture (again) for this post. Couple of reasons for that: first and foremost, I didn't catch but three fish in two days of practice. Second, I had ASSUMED that about the time I caught a big largemouth on Saturday, we would have our picture taken on stage or we could at least get a screen shot of weigh in. Wrong there as well, as the live feed cut out when we were weighing in to cash a check for a 34th place finish on Weiss with 14.25 pounds. 

But, hey, yall ain't here for the pictures of us. You want to hear the story and BOY do we have a story for you! 

Last year, we fished Weiss lake for the first time for the May Alabama Bass Trail event. You can click the link below to read about that event.

Fishing Report for Weiss: Alabama Bass Trail North Division


Suffice to say, 100th wasn't where we wanted to finish, but we were in the log jam at 10 pounds where what those fish ate that morning meant the difference between 100th and 40th. So, going into this year's event, we had a few things we wanted to work out.

First, if the tournament was won at the dam last year, we owed it to ourselves to at least see what the dam offered. So, last Friday, we made the run all the way to the dam and despite knowing how many miles it was, we didn't appreciate just how far 50 miles of winding Coosa river is. When we finally got there, we discovered that the rains from the last two days made for 10-foot high water levels and ripping current. We couldn't fish, heck we couldn't even really get the lay of the land. It was basically a wasted day.

Friday before the tournament, we wanted to check a lot of off-shore stuff. That's something we are good at and with our boat draw of 193, we figured the only way we could likely get on some clean water was going off shore. Last year, we didn't really find off-shore stuff, but we at least found fish on the end of long points. So, we idled a lot. We fished a little. We never got a single bite on off-shore stuff, whether it was channel swings, underwater bridges or roadbeds, or whatever. 

In fact, we caught only three fish and had six bites all day. The common factor? First, shallow seemed to be the only way to get bites, with four or so of the bites we did get coming on one small stretch of docks on a north facing bank. It was the warmest water we had seen. 

With the lack of bites anywhere else, we decided that we would pray something changed positively in that one small stretch. So Saturday morning, we ran to that pocket and began fishing the north bank.

Along the way in, there was a boat on the point of that pocket and they were just wearing the fish out. We counted essentially six fish on six casts for these guys before we even dropped the trolling motor. Seeing that caused us to be more patient than we likely would have been, otherwise. 

So after we fished the docks the first time with a combination of top water and soft plastics, we made another pass simply because the other boat was still there and we planned to fish that point when they left. On this second pass, I picked up a red square bill, the lone consistent bait from last year but one I had not thrown in practice at all. I targeted the west side of those north docks which was holding the little bit of shade still left in the morning. 

As I brought the square bill past the dock pilings, the square bill stopped. The rod loaded up. I knew this was a good one. A big largemouth had crushed the crank and we netted easily the biggest fish we had ever caught on this lake.....except that it was spawned out. Still, this is the kind we needed. 

Next cast on the same side of the next corner of the dock, rod loaded up. Not as big, but still good. Next cast, another decent largemouth. Josh added one and we had four. Minutes later, we had our fifth. They weren't huge, but we had ten pounds at 7:30. That made the day acceptable by both our standards, real quick.

Another pass through those docks was fruitless and we figured (largely confirmed now) that the morning bite was absolutely crucial and since we only had about a 20 minute window to fish that low-light, we got what we got, even if there might have been more to be had. 

Josh and I both culled one fish apiece on the boat now vacated by the spot from earlier that morning. After that, Josh culled twice more and I had just one bite for the rest of the day. 

We weighed in our 14.25 pounds and were initially 28th place with about 50-75 more boats to weigh in. We quickly slid to 31st and I didn't think we would make 40th, so we headed home. I was shocked to find we made it to 34th when the scales closed. We moved up to 105th in points, which was huge considering our dreadful Smith Lake tournament and a sub-par event on Wheeler. 

Fishing Report for Alabama Bass Trail on Wheeler


We fished super clean, with me missing just the one bite. We never lost a fish that we hooked. It wasn't great, but it was a lot better than expected! On to Pickwick in a short two weeks. We aren't where we hoped to be when it came to my Look Ahead post, but, that's why it's fishing! 
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Friday, April 12, 2019

I Ain't Never Been Nothin' But a Loser

Confessions of a Travel Softball Coach


Many of you will read the title of this post and likely realize that it is a Paul "Bear" Bryant quote with just one word substituted. There are no two words in the English language with polar opposite meanings than the two words that have been substituted. America loves a winner and hates a loser. 

Here is the entire quote, if you don't know it: 

“I’d like for people to remember me as a winner, because I ain’t never been nothin but a winner.”

A lot of you are racking your brains on how a staunch Auburn fan would dare quote the antithesis of Auburn football, much less to take that quote about being a winner and turn the quote on himself and call himself "nothin' but a loser". 

We will get there and when we do, I hope you will see that there is no greater force than a motivated perennial loser and that being motivated by losing is the single greatest teaching force in sports. If you want your kid to reach their full potential, to harness every ounce of grit, determination, talent, and work ethic, they will have to lose and the more they lose, the better it will be for them to reach the pinnacle. Furthermore, losing in sports can promote tremendous personal growth and strength off the field. That kind of thinking isn't going to be popular with many people. 

After one of the many brutal losses I took in my first year as a softball coach, I was approached by a parent and asked a very pointed question. 

"How can you be ok after losing like this?"

That would seem to be a fairly nebulous question with many meanings and possible answers. 

Oh, I knew exactly what this parent meant and perhaps they expected a litany of excuses or reasons. The good Lord knows that I know them all. Instead I crossed my arms as I sat on the bench in that tiny little dugout of that tiny little teeball field and shrugged as I thought about my answer. I took off my pink Killa Kupcakes hat and sighed. 

"All I've ever done is lose. I've been a loser all my life. This isn't a new experience for me."

That's probably not EXACTLY how the quote went, but it's close and it isn't the only conversation I had with this parent along these lines. When it comes to ball parents, there are only a few stereotypes and this one was firmly in the "win at all costs" category and the reality of losing game after game, sometimes by a wide margin was unacceptable, for whatever reason. From this parent's perspective, I wasn't doing my job to win games and that me accepting losses in such a calm manner must mean that I was apathetic about coaching and therefore a bad coach and a loser. 

 The truth is, there was a lot more going on with coaching this team than just the W-L column and I was in it for the future. I wasn't willing to take a little immediate success to sacrifice the future. I'd lost a lot of games, what's a few more? 

At least part of what that parent thought was right.  I am a loser. I always have been and I embrace that as the perhaps the single greatest strength in my personality.

Losing in sports started at an early age. In my case, before birth. God gave me a great mind for sports, a desire to succeed in them, and ALMOST all the physical gifts to be a great ball player. I say ALMOST because genetics remains undefeated and I would never have the size or height to do anything to the level I wanted to do. 

As I've written, I played a lot of other sports. I loved basketball, but can't ever recall winning any games. I know we had winless seasons. I played peewee football for just one year and we literally scored two touchdowns the entire winless year. I poured my heart and soul into highschool football and despite playing for the largest school north of Birmingham, our win totals over four years: 6-4, 4-6, 1-9, and 4-6. The best year of soccer I ever had was a .500 team my junior year. We followed that up with a single win my senior year. 

I could tell story upon story of being a loser. Even today, I still play adult league softball, flag football, and soccer. I'll let you guess how those seasons typically go. I've joked with people that I have lost more sports competitions than probably anyone on the planet. But I think the following story shows the power of being a loser and being motivated by that, in the right way. 

Like most kids, baseball was my first sport. Each and every year, we had a baseball draft and each and every year my dad ended up with the same players, but not because they were good players, but because they were the players no one wanted. Every year, there was a really good team from our park and a really bad one. You can guess which team I played on. In the first three years of playing for this team, I don't know if we won a single game. Not only could we not beat the team from our own park, we surely couldn't compete with teams from the more "well-off" areas with much larger populations. There was a lot of frustration to go around, for sure.  

On the fourth year, things changed. I'd love to tell you that we had some sort of great sports moment. It wasn't like that. I believe my dad and the other families came to grips with being handed select players, handicapped on field time, and losing. I believe they accepted this as motivation and not an excuse. That season, we won the only championship I ever won. It was an incredible experience that made a life-long impact on a 3rd grader. It was accomplished by a lot of hard work, working through adversity off the field, but perhaps more important, treating every player equally in attempt to develop them all and refused to give up on a player. Each player was given opportunities that other teams would never give them for fear of losing a game.

Having the power to accept losing by extracting the potential of every player was huge. I've seen it elsewhere and most of the great teams and coaches exhibit this. There's the old cliche about a team being only as good as the worst player, but not every coach lives by that. 

When Aubree began playing softball, I was re-acquainted with this process and I found myself in the same situation that my dad had found himself in years before. I made many phone calls with my dad, who explained that this is what he had dealt with in my youth. I could despair and be overcome by the situation, or I could use my life's lessons on losing to help me in my time of need. 

So, when the question of "How can you be ok after losing like this?" was leveled upon me, I was well prepared for it.  Another loss for me wasn't anything new and it wasn't going to change me. I'd still wake up tomorrow, just as I had done every day after losing. Hopefully, I would wake up with a little more knowledge and just as much determination. Or, I could be the coach society expects. I could yell and scream at players and argue with the umpires. I could quit playing these six year old girls in different positions when there was CLEARLY a better player to play there. I could send the "bad" players into right field and let them kick dirt. 

Games aren't decided by a play. Seasons aren't decided by a game. Sports careers aren't decided by a season. Life isn't decided by a sports career. I am living proof of that. All I've known in sports is losing, but it's made me a motivated coach because I've seen what harnessing that motivation can do and I've been a part of it. So, I accepted the losses as fair trade for giving each and every girl a chance to get better and certainly to keep them from quitting. I looked to the future, hoping they would have a moment like me. 

That team never won anything of relevance, but as I look at the picture on my desk of the 2013 Killa Kupcakes, I am proud to say that at least SEVEN of the ELEVEN players on that team are still playing travel softball, to this day, and they all approach me when I see them at tournaments. That's a far cry from today's expectation of player turnover, which I believe is almost completely driven by coaching to win at all costs. 

Obviously, this entire post is about losing and dealing with adversity. In a society obsessed at winning, and sometimes winning at all cost, the term "dealing with adversity" is thrown around a lot, but not in the context of losing. Losing is simply something that is deemed unacceptable. You can see that if attend your local teeball game. If you don't accept losing, you can't accept the motivation and knowledge it brings. I think this is why sports are on such a decline and society has so many problems. 

The jury is out on just what kind of coach I am for several reasons. First, I am just getting started at being a serious travel ball coach and it will take some time to see if I can develop ball players. 

Second, and most importantly, while preparing them on the field is my main goal, my ULTIMATE goal is to produce well-rounded, humble, and hard-working players who will translate what they learn from me off the field as young adults. Since the oldest player I have coached is just 14, we still have several years to see what kind of young ladies they will become. For all I know, this could be my last year to coach but if it is, I hope I made a positive impact on them, even if the results on the field were negative. 

All of these girls will play their last game sooner rather than later, but life will just begin for them.  I would be remiss if I only coached them on how to field grounders or hit dingers when they will spend far more of their life in the workplace and/or parenting young ball players of their own. Life is going to throw them nasty curves, so to speak. For the vast majority of us, life is going to knock us flat time and time again. Can they get back up? If they know how to respond to losing, they will. 

I sure have. I Ain't Never Been Nothin' But a Loser

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Fishing Report for Wheeler, Ditto Landing 4/11/19

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SURPRISE! Another tough day on the water. 

This is actually a report for the last two Thursday nights. The Ditto Wildcats started back up. Last week, Josh and I fished together. If you recall, the weather was supposed to be really nasty and at one point I had doubts we would be able to fish. Truth is, I have expected to get a text at any point Thursday afternoon telling us to push it off for a week. In addition to the bad weather, current was a major issue, as in....lack of current. 

As if the winter and spring couldn't be weird enough, we had less than 10K CFS current in April, something I don't think I recall ever seeing. That's right. After literally months of over-120K CFS and weeks of completely unfishable water, now we have current fit for July. Pickwick was no different last week, as you can read about here. 

Back to the weather. Most of our good spots are up around Guntersville dam, but there is no service. You may recall that Josh and I were caught in a super nasty lightening storm last year during the Classic that scared both of us real good and had we not had a Good Samaritan to help us, we may not have gotten back. My wife reminded me of this and not-so-subtle like told me not to run more than a mile or two from Ditto. With no current, Ditto would be crappy, but hey....let's go fishing.

.....and it was just as we expected. Bad. It still took a really good 15+ pound bag to win, but it was the lone boat that was brave enough to run up river. Inside Ditto Marina was almost every OTHER boat. We were struggling along with just two fish when we fished along side my buddy Matt and he told us to throw spinnerbaits. I didn't have one with me, but Josh did and we ended up with a limit. It was super small, but at least we had five. As an aside, that is why I LOVE fishing with these guys. We are all competitors, but we are also friends who just want to catch fish.

Josh was out this Thursday, but Wyatt was already out fishing during the day, so we teamed up to fish. TVA was pulling a fair amount of current (60,000 CFS) and the expectation was that the bite would be really good. Naaman had fished Wednesday night and it sounded like several of my spots up river had fish on them, even if the bite was a bit tough. Having learned my lesson last week, we made the run up to the dam. 

We started in a spot I call The Nursery. We call it that because it always has fish, but typically nothing over two pounds. Now, I've had some really good days in there and I've caught a ton of fish, but nothing over three to four pounds. The area fishes super small and once we got to them, we started getting bit. I caught two or three. Wyatt caught one decent fish. Then he had a treble hook break at the boat that lost a really solid fish. We were getting bit, but it was a bunch of dinks. 

I made a huge mistake at this point. The fact that we were getting bit this good at my first stop made me start thinking about getting better bites elsewhere. The line of thinking is, I don't want to sit on a pile of dinks while someone is sitting on a pile of bigs. With that, we left.

That was a major mistake. The wind was howling at a 20 MPH clip, making it impossible to throw anything but cranks. They were not biting. Around dark, we headed back to Ditto with just two fish. Like last week, there were six or seven boats inside Ditto. Still, I was able to find a decent stretch and finished out the limit that included one really nice 2.5 pound fish. I knew it wasn't enough so I dumped them all when I found out several boats had limits. 

It took 12 pounds to win with a steep drop off. The bite was bad for everyone and there wasn't a BIG fish caught, so to speak. 

Yes, the struggle continues. But, we at least caught a few fish. Shakey head was the only thing I could get bit on and while I think you can catch fish in Ditto, the ropes between the slips leaves precious few places to fish. 

With Wyatt having fished all day Thursday without catching anything, with Naaman struggling to get bit Wednesday, and with the struggles across the field Thursday, here's what we know. The big ones are impossible to find right now. Pretty much everything weighed are females. The fish are in all different stages, which has spread them thin. 


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Monday, April 8, 2019

Fishing Report for Pickwick 4/5 and 4/6

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About half of you come here looking for a little knowledge to help you on your next fishing trip. That's great, that's what I am here for.

The other half of you come here looking for a little more than that. You want to read the story. That's great, that's ALSO what I am here for. 

Saturday morning in McFarland Park, we already knew what the day had in store for us. After months and months of record flooding, TVA had dropped the water to the point that they really couldn't drop it any more. Current was cut off for most of the week. Brad had fished the weekend before. One fish. Josh and I fished Friday and the fishing wasn't good. But my friend Naaman had fished the previous Monday and had found something special. Something that was NOT current related. I had other friends that had similar experiences. Fishing was super tough for anyone who could only put a day or so of prefishing together. 

So, come blast-off time, Brad and I had largely conceded that we weren't going to win. But we had decided that we were NOT going to let the previous few tournaments get us down. Facts are facts: this has been the worst start to tournament fishing that I've had since 2010, my very first year fishing tournaments. You can click some of the links below to read just how tough it's been. I haven't sniffed a check since December, which hurts even worse than you would think considering just how Josh and I ended the year. 

Fishing Report for Alabama Bass Trail on Wheeler



The other thing we had conceded was that Naaman was going to win. I didn't say that to him because I genuinely wanted him to do well and I didn't want to put that pressure on him. But I knew that he knew that he could get 12 pounds without much trouble and if he could get some better bites, he had it made. I sure knew we weren't.

Let's go back to the weekend before. Current was low and Brad had one bite fishing for smallmouth. Now, it was a good one, but that's not how you win tournaments. Friday, current was projected at between 9,000 and 12,000 CFS. Basically, that's ZERO. We decided that we would spend the entire day looking for stuff for next month's Alabama Bass Trail tournament. We found a lot of off-shore stuff and actually caught several fish on these new spots, just not good ones. 

Around 2PM, current was kicked up to around 30,000 CFS and we fished a community hole around McFarland that produced a decent bag in about 30 minutes. Nothing huge, but the bit was consistent and good. We ended up catching around 10 in about a 30 minute spread. 

On Saturday, Brad and I decided to fish something completely new to us that wasn't as current dependent. We figured everyone would stay close to McFarland and hit all the community holes. We decided to do the opposite. We would run all the way to Big Bear Creek. Now, we knew there was a BFL out of Mississippi, but we didn't think it would affect us much. 

Wrong. We literally ran all the way down there to find that we could not find a single place to fish. Not one. So, we missed the morning bite completely before deciding to head back up river. 

By the time we did this, it was approaching noon and we had caught two small fish all day and those were the only bites we even had. 

Eventually we punted and decided to fish where Josh and I had found fish the day before. The issue was that there wasn't nearly as much current and the fish weren't nearly as active. I ended up catching a few fish, one of them being a keeper, but it was too little too late. 

Naaman ended up winning it with around 16 pounds. He had a tiny spot and a very specific bite. By mid-morning, the bite was over. But, he did enough damage to win. There were a couple of other limits, but the weights were very poor. 

The good news is, my buddy won and we didn't take it terrible that the fishing was off. The bad news is, the struggles continue and the more that happens, the more pressure I will put on myself. I need something to go right, real soon. 
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Thursday, April 4, 2019

The Importance of Being Well-Rounded

C's Story
The Struggle in the Age of Specialization
Sports: My Anti-Bully

As coach of our travel softball team, AO1, my daily routine to get to practice involved picking up four 13 year old girls and driving them an hour, one way. When I tell people that, I get a lot of "bless your heart" or "you poor guy." To be honest, this drive has been one of the best things I have in my life. It's become a bit of a ministry for me where we discuss a lot of life. Obviously, I haven't seen it all, but I've seen a lot and I have a lot of life experience and I try to give some of that away.

One of the harder conversations that I've had is one that I have been harboring deep inside for a very long time despite being their coach who wants them not only to exceed but to excel. It was a pretty simple one and one that a vast majority of people would see as common sense to the point of being superfluous. 

Do not let sports define who you are. Be a well-rounded individual. 

Most people certainly understand this because they aren't playing sports, anymore or sports were never their focus. Some of you are going to say that this is counter-intuitive to say to girls who want to play sports at the highest level. Some of you may say that this is actually counter-productive to helping them harness that obsessive need to meet those goals. 

We live in a society that does not believe in mediocrity and we obsessively celebrate those that reach greatness. Of course, the problem is that 99.99% of us live in mediocrity and that mediocrity isn't a  bad thing. For the most part, we see the greatness in what these people do and achieve but we do not understand the risks or prices they paid to achieve them. Most people won't accept those risks or put in the work, but for the rest it's simply a matter of life situations being in conflicting paths with our desires OR not understanding where our greatness lies. 

It is easy for most of us to see the path of greatness for some of our greatest athletes but the story of greatness and the prices paid for the greatest minds of our time are the very same. Whether it is Steve Jobs or Tom Brady, everything aligned just perfectly and yet there are still hefty prices to be paid that, frankly, 99.99% of people aren't will to pay. And, understand that we are discussing people who were gifted great minds and great abilities to begin with. Face it, most of us get neither. 

The hardest thing to tell these girls is that one day, sooner rather than later, they WILL play their last softball game and that's where life REALLY begins. Will they be prepared for it or will softball have defined them to the point that they don't know who they are outside of the diamond? 

I can speak from experience on this subject, which is why it mattered so much to me. For every Tom Brady, there are thousands, if not millions of Best5Zachs. Somewhere along the line, I chose my obsession to be sports. That's where I would make my mark of greatness. I didn't think of it in those terms, of course. But certainly being a college football player was a goal I had early in high school. My path, largely, had zero chance because of things out of my control, specifically my genetics, which decided before I was even born that I would never be taller than five-foot-three. 

That didn't stop me. I had made this decision because I allowed sports to define me, but not because of what happened on the field, but how I reacted to things off the field. We humans take the path of least resistance most of the time. So, two weeks into my freshman year in Spanish I, when I completed reading a paragraph in Spanish (very poorly), a girl in the back of the room yelled "NERD!" and caused everyone to laugh at me, I decided that I would not be a nerd. I would push myself as far from being a nerd as possible. If people didn't like nerds, they had to love an athlete. 

I gave up music. I gave up trying to be a good student. I never pursued Honor Society or any other clubs. For the most part, I gave up relationships outside of sports, entirely. For the better part of the next four years, I spent a quarter of my school day (that would be one of the four periods) working out in PE. The rest of the time, I kept my head down, looking forward to practice. I played three sports in high school, so my afternoons and even weekends were dominated by sports. The rest of the time was just filler. 

The only real relationships outside of sports I had for most of high school came from my youth group at Church. I was basically the only kid that didn't attend the local private school, which made me a bit of an outsider, but I still fit in with them really well despite going to another school and being younger than all of them. Sunday was the only day I wasn't doing sports, typically, so it was the only time I had to make relationships. And, frankly, I wasn't very good at that because sports was the only thing I really knew anything about and the only real thing of value I possessed. 

Two things happened when I became an upperclassman. One, the kids in my youth group graduated and went to college. For the most part, I never had any relationship with any of them afterwards, something that still bothers me to my core and I've only recently opened up about to people other than my wife. For a very long time, I harbored a grudge for the feeling of abandonment. I felt like I had put effort into relationships, forsaking those at school, for people that didn't appreciate it. I realize now that they were not entirely to blame for this. I had cornered myself. 

The second thing that happened was that when I attempted to build relationships at school, I was appalled to how many people didn't care that I was a three-sport athlete. Most of these kids already had groups of friends, with whom they had been hanging out with during the week and weekends and, try as I might, I couldn't identify with them. 

One day in May of 2001, I played my last game. Now what? I was unprepared for college, both educationally and emotionally because I had focused my energy for four years into something almost obsessively. 

Now, I don't want people thinking this is some emotionally-charged post about poor me. Everything was ok. I did have friends and a lot of fun. Truth be told, it wasn't until I was an adult that I even knew this had happened to me. Would I have given up sports if I had known it would never take me anywhere? Absolutely not. What I would have changed was my focus on things off the field. School wouldn't have been a means to an ends. I would have been more interactive and involved. I'd have done a much better job and making friends outside of sports. I would have made myself a more well-rounded person. After all, these are the things that mattered for the next 20 years. 

As I am telling this to these girls, there are a couple of stipulations. Yes, I ended up getting a great education and a terrific job. It's hard to complain about being a NASA engineer. But, I point out that a lot of this happened because of the pieces of the path laid out before me by factors I didn't control and while I am lucky and happy to be here, what would have happened if I had focused more on education and less on sports? I gave up three years of my life in college to struggling to pass classes because I had no work ethic in studying because I had built such a work ethic in sports and only on the field. 

When sports were done, I filled that void with what I had been missing: having fun and making friends. I lost a free ride scholarship. I had a terrible relationship with my parents because of my college grades. I nearly gave up and dropped out multiple times. In the end, I had the work ethic to be great at something, but instead of choosing to be a great student and become an elite engineer, I had chosen sports. That choice to focus on a single thing, the wrong thing, set me back years and likely cost me the ability to be a great engineer, which I was far more destined to be rather than an elite athlete. 

Kids need clubs. They need jobs. They need a lot of life experiences, especially in high school, to prepare them for the rest of their lives. Sports alone don't do that. Everyone has some sort of greatness in them but so few ever find what that is. Without life experiences, how will you ever know. Playing sports wasn't what I was meant to be great out. Engineering probably isn't either. Parenting? I hope so. Secretly, I've wondered if it's coaching. I won't know unless I keep trying things with the focus on being great. 

Is that a tough sell to a car full of girls who love the game? Was it what they expected to hear from the guy they only see on the field, who pushes them to excel? Almost certainly. But it is something they need to hear and not only from me, but from their parents. I am not saying not to push them or support them to be their very best. I am simply saying that so few of us find that path and that preparing them for life outside of sports, to be well-rounded, will serve them well in their life. Eventually we all play that last game and what happens next is what defines us. 

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Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Sports: My Anti-Bully


A life spent around people from all walks of life has taught me one thing: sports aren't for everyone. Some of my very best friends are as well-rounded people as you would find and they didn't play a second of organized sports. Riding to work today, I listened to a story on the radio where a teen shot three other teens due to bullying and that started the wheels turning in my mind about this post and why sports are so important and how dealing with adversity on the field prepares you to deal with problems off the field. I don't know if it would have helped these individuals, but there isn't a doubt that sports prepared me for dealing with bullying and it did so on and off the field.

Not many people can say this, but I think I can. There was a moment when sports made me a man and not only showed me this growth in an instant, but I believe all of the young men around me. 

In the summer of 1997 after my eighth grade year, my dad drove me to a summer workout at my future high school. After practice concluded, my dad introduced himself and I to the varsity coach with the sole purpose of begging the coach to allow me to play varsity football as a freshman. I had played on the freshman team in seventh and eighth grade, but this year there would not be a freshman team and my dad did not want me to fall behind.

This was, frankly, a ballsy move by my dad. I was five foot tall and weighed 100 pounds. Not only did I not have anything of value to add to the team, I would be the only freshman to go through summer workouts. While two of my future teammates would eventually find their way onto the varsity team as freshman later in the year, I was the only freshman to have a roster spot on Day One. 

I don't recall being overwhelmed at playing with grown men. I just put my head down and went to work, which I already had a good reputation for from the previous two years. Was there bullying in the locker room towards me? Some. But in the heat of the summer, no one had the energy to push me around. There were warnings, however, of what life would be like at school. For a kid that came from a tiny K-8 grade, for which many kids had already dropped out, for a kid that started in "advanced" classes, for a kid that played Cello and went to Church three times a week, for a freckle faced five-footer that weighed 100 pounds, it was terrifying. If there was ever a kid that would be bullied, it was me. 

Over that summer, I completely lost touch with my friends from eighth grade. I knew no one from the other middle schools, whose population dwarfed my small rural school. So, on day one of high school, I knew no one in my classes. The first morning before the first bell rang was probably the most intimidating moments in my life. The old Sparkman High School had narrow and dark hallways and my freshman classes were at the end of a long row of upperclassmen lockers and I had to walk past big scary boys that seemed like giants to me. 

No one touched me. No one pointed and laughed. On that first Freshman Friday, I remember getting off the bus and standing outside the breeze way because I was terrified of getting thrown in a garbage can. I literally waited for the first bell to ring before sprinting to my first class. I had even planned the route. After the last bell rang and all of the football players, including the guys my age playing JV, made there way into the field house, my worst fears seemed to come true. It was a free-for-all on underclassmen and while I didn't get the brunt of it, I still got a lot. That stopped almost entirely one day and it is that moment to which I refereed. 

For some reason, we were short on running backs. I know that our senior star was out with a torn ACL and while there was no way I was going to play running back for varsity, coach needed a tomato can on the practice squad to play running back. I had played QB my entire football career, but I wasn't about to second guess coach. He was far more intimidating than anyone else on the field. I was absolutely terrified at first, but after that first hit, I settled in to playing this position. 

Goal line drill. Sweep right. The ball is pitched behind me and I slow my momentum to catch the pitch. 

I woke up staring at a blue bird Alabama sky in August with tears streaming down my face. 

I was helped to my feet and handed my helmet, which had nearly been knocked into the stands. 

A lot of things happened in a very short time but here is what I have gathered. The defensive end and offensive tackle thought it would be really funny if the D-end came off the ball untouched to destroy the little freshman kid from the backwoods school.  

Coach didn't think it was funny. More importantly, neither did a lot of the other players. But while they were arguing, coach gave me my helmet, strapped my helmet back on,  and I wiped the snot from my nose, and he said:

"Run it again."

This isn't sensationalism where the little kid that could started for varsity and became a college running back. Nothing could be further from the truth. I never played running back again. I had virtually zero playing time that year. The bearing on the team's success or failure wasn't affected a single bit from that day. But I took the hit and I got back up. 

My life changed that day and I become the competitor I am because of the events leading to that moment. 

What changed? 

First, despite being a musician, a nerd, and generally a little boy in a world of men, I earned the respect of not only that football team, but a lot of people in the school. It didn't just happen that day, either. Going through two-a-days, bleeding with them, making the trips with the team even though I wouldn't see a second of PT made me one of them, regardless of the difference of size, age, social background, or ethnicity. There could not have been a wider gap between me and those guys but that was a gap I never knew because of sports. That gap disappeared for those guys, too, because when we are all throwing our guts up, race, religion, age, and ability just don't matter. A player is a player. 

Because of that earned respect, I was never bullied by the guys that may have been stereotypical bullies despite being a stereotypical kid. 

That doesn't mean I wasn't bullied. I was, but eventually that stopped for the second thing that changed for me. Coach made me get up. I'm not going to say I would have done it on my own because, frankly, that was the most physically dominated I had ever been, and probably remains so. But I did get up and after that few seconds of fear passed, I realized that I had just lived through the worst hit I would ever take and that gave me such confidence. 

So, one day when these same guys kept bullying me, that newfound confidence bubbled over. They used me to practice their WWE moves and how I managed to avoid brain damage is still beyond me. In the past, my best defense was to basically play dead. Not this time. I won't go into what happened, except to say that I was never bullied again when I caught these two guys by surprise. 

Last, there were still some moments that were scary for me and these typically involved a big mean kid that didn't play sports. I was easy prey being the little freshman boy by himself without any friends his own age. But what they didn't realize was that I did have other friends. I can tell you that some of the biggest, meanest men I ever played with on the field of battle took up for me in the moments when I needed them. These guys owed me nothing. Aside from football, we had nothing in common and, really, still don't. When I became an upperclassman, I brought the same mentality for the young kids, being the senior player. 

Sports aren't for everyone and that's perfectly acceptable. It seems that our society has decided that if you aren't good at sports, then there is no place for you in sports and therefore nothing sports can do for you. That simply isn't true. The lack of participation in sports is getting to all-time lows in this country while the affects of bullying are at an all time high. Understand that I am not saying sports will prevent kids from making rash decisions because it won't. But it will help. It is a respect problem. Respect is earned, but that works both ways. The people who bully have never been there, have never earned respect of others nor had respect earned by others to them. 

Sports made me who I am. It forged relationships that I never would have had without it. I never made a cent off of sports. I never played a second after high school. But it taught me work ethic. It taught me toughness. It taught me respect and how to be a teammate on and off the field.  It was my anti-bully. 

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