“Craig, is that as fast as you can go” that was coach yelling at me. Its freshman year and I want to start varsity.
As the school day goes by I think about how this first practice of the season is going to be. Is it going to be hard? Will we be running a lot? Those questions run through my mind the entire day. As the day is ending I’m starting to make myself get a little nervous.
It’s 3:05. The bell rings, and I leave the last class of the day. As I head to the locker room, I see the coaches standing their waiting and looking at me and all the other freshman walking nervously to the locker room. I had been practicing all summer and all the summers before that, so I was hoping that they would notice I’d been working hard for this starting spot. We started off the practice by doing a shooting warm-up. After that, it was going to be a pretty hard practice, that consisted of running many gut drills, tough scrimmaging, yelling, and some girls crying. I thought that this would be the hardest practice of the season, but I was wrong.
Three weeks into our season, we played Wilson, one of the toughest teams we played. It was right after Thanksgiving break, we hadn’t practiced that much. Which was probably a bad thing. We lost 82-33. We played terrible; Coach said we looked afraid of them, we were afraid to take a hit from them. He was going to fix that…
The next practice we walked into them gym to find football gear sitting in the bleachers. Coach said three words “put it on” we all looked at each other thinking the same thing. Is he crazy? Why would he make us practice in football pads, and helmets, we even had mouth guards that we were forced to wear. I hated mouth guards because they make it harder to breathe and you get cotton mouth easily. We put the gear on like he had told us, and started a shooting warm-up. He and all the other coaching staff walked out of their office. Our coach said if we were afraid to be hit he got us protection. It didn’t feel like it was protecting us. It felt like it was making everything worse. At the end of the practice we were beaten, battered, and exhausted. We were also ready to beat the next team we played; everybody was ready to hit the next team like we were hit that day. From then on that’s how we would play the game the rest of the season. At the end of season we had lost a few and won a few more, but I learned a lot and accomplished my goal. I started varsity.