Growing up, I’ve learned a lot of lessons. Some have been from my parents or a coach telling me, and others have been from experience; like using a timer on the microwave instead of heating the glass dish that’s inside. Most of these lessons that I’ve learned, and have left a meaningful mark on my life, have come from playing sports.
Growing up, I have always been in one sport or another. In the seventh grade, I joined my school’s football team. Joining the football team was the cool thing to do in middle school, so I joined. At this point, I was not a very big kid, and the day came when we had to choose what position we wanted to play on the team. I decided to join the offensive line, because that was the only coach whose name I knew. I played football on the team for the two years of middle school. I never made it to a starting position, and I never really got that much playing time. But by the end of my time at the school, I didn’t realize how much this game would affect my life.
Freshman year of high school came along, and I joined the football team. About three weeks into my freshman year, I became sick. I started to cough uncontrollably, and for a month, I stayed at home. I went to a lot of different doctors to try and figure out what was wrong, but none of them knew what was going on. After a month, I ran out of sick days and had to go back to school.
My first day back at school, I got called into the assistant principal’s office for being truant. After about a minute of the AP talking to me, they realized that I had a real reason for being out of school, and the school set me up for a program in which a teacher would go to my house and help me with my school work. Twice a week a teacher would come to my house and help me through the work that I had missed. This went on for another two months, and by the end of it, I had gained twenty pounds and still wanted to play football. By the end of the freshman season, I did not play in a single game. To top it all off, I had to start back at square one with getting back into shape. This started me down a path that helped me develop mental toughness.
During the spring semester of my junior year of high school, I started to notice something weird happening to my heart. At first, I would wake up at random times during the night, and my heart would be racing. I didn’t think much of this at first, but this continued for a few months. After a while, my heart began to have these episodes in the middle of the day, and they became longer and more frequent. One day during practice, I had an episode, but this one was different. My head started to become light, and I was starting to lose my vision, but I had to drive my friend back to his house. Halfway through the drive, I completely lost my vision, and my friend had to direct us to his house. After a few months, we found out that I had a heart problem called Wolf Parkinson’s White. In short it, makes your heart rate shoot up to the 200 beats-per-minute range in a second. During my senior season of football, I had a heart surgery to fix the problem. I lost most of the chances to play, and I only got to go onto the field on senior night.
During the spring of my senior year of high school, I went on a school visit to Ouachita. I instantly fell in love with the school, and one of my friend’s I was visiting with said I should talk to the coaches and see if I could join the team. Three years later, and I’m still playing for the Tigers. I have learned so much through my experience with football, but the main lesson that I have learned is that you don’t know what will happen in your life. And frankly, you don’t have as much control over it as you would like. Things can change in a second, and your life will never be the same. But it’s not what happens to you that defines you; it’s what you do in response to what happens to you that defines who you are. Life is 10 percent what happens you and 90 percent what you do about it, so what are you going to do about it?
By John Sharp, Staff writer
