I sat in the cafeteria at the end of the school day and stared out the window and watched as millions of tiny little rain drops came down and struck the earth. I thought to myself, “Wow, what a great day to go home and relax after this long dreadful school day.” However, right when this thought struck me I remembered, “Oh wait,” I said to myself, “I have to go practice football for 5 more hours.” The thought alone put me in a terrible mood and just then the bell sounded and the school day was over. As I was walking in the halls I saw a bunch of kids happy to be finally let out for the day while I was angry because the hardest part of my day had not even begun yet. I saw my friend, who was a junior on the football team just like me, walking towards the locker room and when I saw his face, I knew he was feeling the same way as me, pissed.
As I walked into the locker room I saw everyone changing into their pads and cold weather gear, I looked at them confused and asked, “It’s pouring, we’re practicing outside?” Everyone in the locker room looked at me and a couple of guys responded, “No s*** we’re practicing outside, we have done it the whole damn season.” I should have expected this as we had practiced outside in worse weather before, but now I was in an even worse mood because an inside practice would have been much easier. I slowly changed in to my gear and I was a little late to practice, everyone was stretching by the time I got there and I got an earful right away.

After the stretching we went into hitting drills, just what I wanted! We got into our groups and knowing my luck I was paired with one of the biggest hitters on the team, now they say to just wrap up but that didn’t happen, I got rocked. I went to the ground and I’m surprised it didn’t cause an earthquake. I got up and was still shaken up from the collision, I slowly stumbled back to my position waiting to get hit again, praying that the whistle would sound before we went again and we could finally move on to the next station and relax for a little while and daydream about coach finally blowing the whistle to end practice whenever that would be (probably close to 8) and I could finally go home and lay down in my comfortable bed and get some much needed sleep. This daydream was abruptly ended however, when I got hit again with about the same force and instead of falling down into the bed like I dreamed about, I hit the hard unforgiving turf. Coach finally then blew the whistle ending the hitting drills and called for a water break. Just as I was about to get my water the break ended and I had to hustle down to the end of the field to practice with the linemen.

We went through our usual warm ups and then we went on to practice some offensive line stuff. Coach Mendez called up the starting offensive line and then said he needed a scout team defense, which I was just so lucky to be on. I was probably the smallest defensive linemen on the team and that is not a good thing at all and I was at a great disadvantage because of this. Well today I got to go up against one of the hardest hitters on the line, and one who was known to continue to hit after the whistle, great. Things were going as usual and I was getting my ass handed to me, but then the defensive line coach called a play that I had no idea what to do on. I tried to ask someone what I was supposed to do but no one responded and the ball was snapped and I went to the wrong hole. Immediately after the play ended, Coach Fee got in my face and screamed, “Who is that, Jake?” I was surprised he knew my name, he continued screaming and I heard, “Jake, what the hell are you doing, do you not know the damn plays!” As he screamed this to me I thought, “Well you know coach, when you get in as little as I do, learning the plays isn’t really my top priority,” however, I knew I couldn’t respond this way and decided on just responding with, “Sorry coach, won’t happen again.” I then went back on the field and continued to get my ass kicked for about an hour longer.

Team offense came next and we would use the same people on this scout team defense during this drill and I thought, “Great, now I get to get my ass kicked in front of everyone.” I went up against the same offensive lineman and I had no chance of beating him. I would get rocked every single play and get yelled at after every single play and it was not worth it at all. I finally got subbed out and got my drink of water that I had waited 2 hours for and went to the sidelines to take a break and talk with my friends. We talked about how terrible this was and we even joked about if it would be better to just get injured. We all laughed about it but I know that to me, that sounded like a great idea and I thought to myself that it would not be so bad if I broke an ankle or something like that and I even looked at the injured players with envy. As terrible as it is, I watched them just sit there joking around, having a good time, sitting in their comfortable street clothes while I sat there in my uncomfortable pads and dreading every single minute of it, I actually wished I could be one of those kids and at the time it seemed like something such as a broken collarbone was better than football practice.

I continued to come in and out during this drill and every minute in the drill seemed like hell, it was a constant cycle of me lining up, getting pushed to the ground, the offensive lineman diving on me, the whistle blowing, and getting screamed at by the coach. Occasionally I would somehow make a play, and during those rare occasions, I would get up and walk back to the huddle expecting the coach to be happy, but even when these occasions happened the coach still found something bad in what I did, there was no winning. Finally, I screwed up big time on one of the plays and went to the wrong hole and was lucky enough where the ball ended up going to the hole I was supposed to be in. Coach Fee screamed at me and told me to take a lap, joke was on coach as I would much rather take a lap then get killed in practice. I took my lap around the field and as the rain poured on me, I finally had some time to think to myself. Again, I thought about how great it was going to feel when the final whistle blew, I could finally go home, have a nice meal, watch some TV, and jump into bed and have my head hit that soft pillow. During this run, I asked myself one question that really stuck with me and to this day I have not found an answer to, why do I do this? I thought about how I dreaded every minute of every practice, how these practices would run till the crack of dawn and I had no time to relax at home as I was trying to deal with school and football, how I got absolutely demolished in these practices and got yelled at for getting demolished when there was literally nothing I could do, how I would go through all of this terrible practicing and not even get in the games at all, and how I knew it was enough when I wished I would get injured. This run was actually a blessing in disguise as it made me realize for the first time that I really should not play football anymore, and it got me out of the rest of practice so that was also a good thing.
The practice was finally winding down, but one of the worst parts of the practice was coming up, conditioning. We lined up on the goal line and when the coach blew his whistle, we sprinted to the other goal line. We did this 8 times and after the eighth sprint we were gassed. But that wasn’t it, we then had to do what were called perfect 40’s and they were 40 yard sprints and if one person jumped offside’s, or didn’t sprint, or slowed down a foot short, it didn’t count and we would have to run it again. Now, the coaches obviously couldn’t pay attention to everyone so they just made it realistic and would put up their finger occasionally signaling that it didn’t count and that someone messed up, even though they didn’t watch at all. We were supposed to do 8 of these but we ended up running about 15 and after we were finally done, I felt like dying right there. We all were waiting for coach to blow his whistle and end practice, but that didn’t happen, we had one more thing to do for conditioning and that was the timed lap. We all had to run around the field in under a minute and a half and after 4 hours of practice and about 20 sprints, it’s a lot easier said than done. I remember coach blowing the whistle, everyone sprinting out, rounding the first corner already tired as hell, sprinting the length of the football field, rounding the second corner and sprint the width of the football field, rounding the 3rd corner, sprinting the length of the football field again ignoring the terrible cramp I had, getting about halfway as I heard coach scream, “Fifteen seconds!” sprinting even harder, rounding the last corner, crossing the line with about 5 seconds to spare, collapsing to the ground, and hearing those great two words come from his mouth, “Made it!”

Practice finally ended after this and coach gave his end of the practice speech and then we all made our way to the locker room. I got to the locker room still out of breath and got changed and looked at my phone and saw that it was 8:45. I did a double take and looked again and I saw 8:45 again, this made me furious as I had no time to do my history project that was due the next day. I drove home and got there at about 9:00 and got some much needed food in my stomach. I then spent the next 4 hours working on my history project and somehow got it done and got to sleep around 2:00, still with much more homework to do. This was the last straw and at this point I knew that I was done with football after this season.