High School Swimming -Senior/Only Season

               My Senior year I decided I was going to swim during the winter. The reason I decided to is because my two best friends were trying for 3 years to get me to swim and the swim coach was a friend of my family’s and I promised her I would swim. Swimming is by far the hardest sport I have ever done in my life. You use muscles you have never used before and you are always tired. A 2 hour practice in any other sport, flies by, but a 2 hour practice for swimming feels like a 6 hour practice because there is no time to distract yourself. You have to be paying attention to your breathing, your strokes, your kick, when you should do your flip turn how many sets you have to, and how many meters you have swam. It is mentally and physically draining. But it is a great workout and I honestly wish I would have swam all 4 years of high school because I think I could’ve gotten pretty good. Swimming is awful but it feels great when you realize how much better you are getting. At the beginning of the year, I was struggling to make it through practices, and we were swimming a mile or less. By the end of the season we are swimming 3 or 4 miles. Halfway through the season we had our hell week. It was horrible. We had to swim in sweatshirts one day, shoes the next, and then swim in sweatshirts and shoes the day after that. What’s funny is during that week is when I finally started to feel my mechanics click and I was starting to get it. The worst part about that week is because of wearing the sweatshirts, my nipples started to chafe. I never had that happen before and I never want it to happen again. Swimming was tough because you had two-a-days almost every other day. Show up to school at 6am for lift and then at 7:45pm you had practice at the pool. That was a continuous cycle for 2 months. Looking back on it, it was pretty ironic what events I swam in because when we had our mock meet, I swam a 100 meter sprint and I couldn’t even finish and I threw up. By the end of the season I swam the 100 meter sprint at sectionals and got 1^st place in my heat. I don’t ever want to swim competitively like that ever again, but it was a good time while I was doing it.

High School Basketball - Freshmen and Sophomore Season

High school Basketball was a short but fun career. I played my freshman and sophomore year before I decided to stop playing. Going into my freshman year, I wasn’t very good at basketball. I was decent at defense, but I wasn’t very good at handling the ball or scoring. I decided that my freshman year I was going to become a better basketball player, so I worked a lot at my ball handling and my shot. I even asked our senior point guard to stay after practice to work with me. That year I started scoring a lot more, I was afraid to shoot the ball anymore. One game I started the game off on fire and they faced guarded me the rest of the game, so I felt pretty dang cool for that. I kept producing so I got called up to JV to play point guard and that was a big deal to me because no other freshman played, let alone start. One big thing I remember from that year is that against our rival team during a freshman game I fell and landed on my left elbow 3 times and when I looked at my elbow it looked like there was a grapefruit on the tip of it. They took me out of the game I had to go to ER, and I found out that inflamed my bursa sac. Going into my sophomore year, the head varsity coach was fired, and the new coach liked my play, so I was going to get some time on varsity. He was a lot different coach that our other one, he yelled a lot more and I enjoyed that because when I get yelled at it makes me work harder. I remember that year there were only two sophomore that actually got to play varsity and playing varsity basketball is probably the most nervous I have ever been. One of my favorite games was when we were playing in a holiday classic and the senior ahead of me wasn’t playing good and I was, so in a high pressure situation when we were only up by 4 with a minute left, I was playing point guard trying to keep us ahead. I only wish I played as good as I did then, the rest of the year. I was very spotty throughout the year. Much like football our basketball program wasn’t very good either.

High School Football - Senior Season

My senior season of football was honestly my best year and the team’s best year. I came in where I ended last year, as a wide receiver and a cornerback. But this year I was doing a lot better when it came to what I was doing running crisp routes and catching the balls thrown my way. I tried to make the best of my opportunities at practice and in games. I made just I did the best I could in practices because I wanted the coaches to trust me and put me in on pass plays and I wanted our quarterback to trust me and get me the ball. This year was filled with great memories. Our program got our first win in two years, on week 1 of the season. We won 34-14. One of my next favorite memories was week 3, our first home game of the year, I had like 7 tackles and 2 interceptions, one of the interceptions was in the 4^th quarter when we were up 21-7. Our safety tipped a pass and I jumped up and caught it and almost returned it for a pick 6. The other pick was late in the 4^th quarter and the receiver was running a fade route and I undercut him because the ball was thrown short and I picked the ball off in front of him. That was an awesome way to start off the homestand my senior year. Another memory I will never forget is week 5 I ran a fade route into the endzone, and our quarterback threw me the ball and I jumped over this dude and caught it over him in the endzone. The referee called me out of bounds but on film you can see I was in fact in bounds. Another great memory of that day is a brawl started between both teams halfway through the 4^th quarter and it was freaking sweet. Finally, senior night was another great memory because I got to suit up with one of my best friends playing on our home field for the last time and even though we lost it was still a great experience. This year was the first time in 20 years we started the season off 4-2, and we were in the run to get into the playoffs, but when we started thinking of the playoffs we kind of fell of the wagon and ended the year 4-6 which was still the best year we had in 10 years but still could have been much, much better.

High School Football - Junior Season

My junior season, we got a new head coach, he was actually one of the assistants the year before. I came in as QB1 and one of our corner backs. Our QB2 from the year before became our running back. Throughout camp/two-a-days it was a close battle between me and our QB2 but I won the battle and was our QB1. The big reason it was a close battle was because he had a cannon for an arm and I didn’t. Week 1 was a home and I started, he came in occasionally late in the game in very long-distance situations because he had an awesome arm. We ended up losing the game 6-0. The following Monday, our head coach called me into his office and told me he was switching me to wide receiver because guys were hurt and we needed athletes out there. That could have partially bee the reason but I knew it was because he had a really good arm. I said, “ok”. The rest of the season I was a wide receiver and it look me the whole year to get comfortable out there because you are literally by yourself, its not like playing QB or H-back because those two positions are inside not way out in no-mans land. Also, I was playing corner back this year, this was the first year since 6^th grade I would play defense full-time, so I was nervous about that. It took me a couple weeks but I started feeling somewhat comfortable playing corner back but it took me the whole year to be comfortable playing wide receiver. I could catch the ball well sometimes, but other times I had stone hands. When I say this, the balls that we getting thrown my way were mainly in practice. A couple were thrown my way in games but it was my first time playing that position so understandably, our QB didn’t really trust me too much yet. To fix the stone hands, I had my dad toss bricks at me and I had to catch them with my hands and it helps very well to give when you are catching the ball, not keeping your hands stiff because when they are stiff the ball will just bounce off. I played decent this year, most of the plays I made being on defense, but it could’ve been a lot better, and as a team our season could’ve been a lot better. For the second year in a row we went 0-10. Thus far in my high school career our football program has had a combined record of 1-29.

High School Football - Sophomore Season

For my sophomore football season, I came in as QB3 in the depth chart and it wasn’t looking like I was going to play QB for varsity anytime soon. I did good during two-a-days and on the first play in our two scrimmages I ran for a 70 yard touchdown, which was awesome. Late in our last scrimmage, our QB1 dislocated his knee cap wasn’t about to play week 1, so I was now QB2 for at least a week. During our week 1 game late in the first quarter our QB got hurt and I had to go in. The team we were playing went 8-2 the year before and finished this year at 10-0. I was beyond nervous to play against them because I was a small, scrawny sophomore playing against these absolute MEN. I remember two vary distinct plays when I got in, one was the middle linebacker laying out our running back and then throwing up and pointing at me and then me getting laid out while throwing a screen pass. Safe to say, we got killed that game and the next week I was back on the bench. I played close to half of that season as the JV quarterback and I was trying to play as hard and as best as I could because I felt I should play on varsity.  At like week 4 or 5 I got moved to H-back on varsity. The H-back is a hybrid running back/wide receiver/tight end. Getting moved there was awesome because I was getting balls thrown my way and I actually enjoyed blocking and I was finally playing varsity permanently, it was cool because it was awesome being in the trenches and seeing the offense from a different perspective. But, initially after the switch in the positions, I had to ask a lot of questions about what to do because I was unsure, playing QB I knew what people were doing but it was entirely different actually doing it. The coolest part about playing that position, is that I had reverse play for me called, “45 Colorado”, and during the last game of the season against our crosstown rivals, my buddy and I had to block one of their linebackers at the same time and when we hit him we went flying and it was probably one of the funniest things ever. We ended up going 0-10 which obviously wasn’t good. We were awful, but our best game of the year was against our rivals we ended up losing 42-20 but we kept it close for a while, and this was the year our rivals made it to the state semis.