I love to get "High"

Did I get your attention? Before you go running to tell everyone that I'm blogging about some drug stories..let me explain what I mean. First off I am not talking about illegal narcotics. The kind of high I am talking about is the high I get from running, swimming, biking, basically just exercising in general. It's really quite amazing how crappy I can feel during any particular point in time and how that can totally change with the simple act of moving my body. I may be tired and exhausted from a long day/week of work but 10 minutes into a run/or a spin/ or a swim and I can feel as if my legs/body /arms/mind have been rejuvenated. Maybe my legs or arms are't moving as fast as they would after a nice long nap but hey I still feel that I've been refreshed. The best part about getting "high" from athletics is that it hardly costs anything. All it takes is you getting your butt out the door or onto the trainer. (Ok...I take that back it costs a lot if you really look at all the money that it took to buy the running shoes, bike, trainer, garmin, etc..etc...) So maybe it does cost a lot but lets get serious here. I am talking about how great it feels to exercise. I don't have to be racing to get a smile on my face. I am one of those weirdo's who actually enjoyed the heck out of high school football practice. Don't get me wrong, gameday for high school football was a blast! A truly unique experience in a small town where on Saturday afternoon, your the only show in town! And we were pretty good when I was in school so we had some great support. But I just loved practice, I loved being with the guys, I loved getting yelled at by the coaches. Why? Because the coaches were great guys, my head coach, Brian Minor, a truly great man really cared about us all. He was a special coach because he got the absolute most potential out of every player on his team. He made each and every kid want to be the best, made each and every kid want to do whatever they could to make the team the best! I think that may be the most important aspect. As a coach your job is to get the maximum out of everybody on the team, otherwise success will be hard to come by. Look at Kobe Bryant, as great as he is, he couldn't win a Championship without Shaq until the Lakers surrounded him with players like Pao Gasol who actually wanted to win, who wanted to work hard. Same thing with Jordan, until he had Pippen and his supporting cast of Dennis Rodman, Luc Longly, Steve Kerr, and the list could go on...he was not winning championships. Sure he was winning dunk contests, racking up tons of points, but the one thing that he wanted, Championships, were not coming his way until he was surrounded by a cast of characters who wanted to win, and wanted to do all the little things. When a coach gets a team to fire on all cylinders that's when magic happens. A high school football coach has to make the big kids WANT to be the lineman and want to block for the fast kids. I mean when your 16 years old who didn't want to be the one to score TD's! So how do you get that large kid into the mentality of a lineman? Well you start out by grouping them together, make the lineman a family unit. Start building pride in them by congratulating them more for a running backs touchdown than the running back. Believe me, the running back is going to get the front page of the newspaper, but the fact is, he wouldn't have got their unless those big guys up front threw some blocks. So there in lies the beauty. A great coach makes everyone want to do their job because if they do, the wins will come..and everyone loves to win!

So I got really of track there but what I was trying to say is that I loved practicing, I loved the fact that even though I was not as big or as strong as some of the top football players around, I was still a starter. I knew how to block, I knew how to complete my assignments, I caught the passes when they were thrown to me, got the first down, and got down....mostly :)...haha, I made most of the field goal attempts I had. I was not a college prospect but I still was "player of the game once"...that was and still is something I am very proud of. I don't mean to gloat but I really didn't think I would ever have the chance to be considered for that kind of award in football. Let me remind you that I was the kid who stopped playing football when he was a freshman because he figured he would never really be that good and he should just focus on basketball and baseball...(haha basketball, what was I thinking..5 foot nothing white kid..I had not shot from the beginning, lol). Thankfully Coach Minor slapped some sense into me and got me back onto the gridiron. How did he do this? He just told me that I was an athlete and that I should be playing football. Plain and simple. My friends all played and I really missed being with them. Once I was back playing football I had to find a way to be on the field. It didn't really matter where I played, all that mattered was that I wanted to start, I wanted to be a player, I wanted to make some kind of impact! Somehow Coach Minor made me a great safety, receiver and kicker...a "joy boy" as he would call us. And I was by no means fast or tall..I just did my job, I blocked when I needed to, I made most of my field goal and extra point attempts, intercepted the occasional pass, and even threw for 3 touchdowns from the wide received position..yeah we PY mustangs had some tricks up our sleeves!...I just can't say how great it was to kick that extra point after my teammates scored a touch down. I felt that i was just as much a part of their 60 yard run as they guy who threw the key block, I made an impact in the game, and that to me made a big deal. So back to the practice thing, Yeah you'd get yelled at in practice when you'd miss a fieldgoal, or miss a block, but when it came to game time and you executed your job...OMG it was just awesome! Coach's would be going nuts, announcers going nuts, fans clapping..it was nice. I will always have those memories of the two seasons I played Varsity Football, it was really more than just a high school sport to me. We were our own little family unit. We had convicted fellons, straight A students, jocks...etc. You name we had it, we were a bit of a rag tag bunch but we meshed really well. We knew what we had to do to win and we loved doing it. It was always cool to be the last "fall" team to still be playing. It would almost be Thanksgiving and the basketball season had begun but us football guys were still putting on the pads and knocking helmets out on the field, that was cool!