High School Football - Freshmen Season

My high school freshmen football season was a big adjustment for me. Going from 8^th to freshman year is a lot different. You go from practicing with people your age to practicing with guys who are 15, 16, 17, 18 years old. Two-a-Days are also a lot different instead of just practicing for 2 hours like before, for about 2 weeks in the beginning of August, you’re practicing for 6 hours a day, and honestly as a freshman you are not ready for that, you don’t really even adjust for it until your sophomore year. Our freshman season was average, we won a couple games, but lost a lot more. The football program where I went to school wasn’t very good. But, they let freshmen dress on Friday nights for games so it was awesome getting to run out of the tunnel and be on the sidelines for those games. Our varsity team went 1-9 that year. The big thing I remember from the freshman year is the injury I sustained on my left pinky finger. We were playing a freshmen away game and that year I was playing Quarterback and we were losing bad and one of our linebackers got hurt so our coach put me in. On the second to last play of the game, I was making a tackle and one of the defensive linemen came back to help out and put his face mask right on my finger and the tip of my left finger literally exploded. I ran over to the sideline and our coach sprayed water on it and I screamed from the pain and I could see my bone. My family and I left immediately and went to the hospital at the hospital, instead of doing surgery they just stitched me up, well, that didn’t sit well with my parents and the next day we went to my family doctor and he referred me to a surgeon. The next day I went to the surgeon, he took one look at it and said, “I’ll see you in OR, we need to perform surgery on this.” My being who I am, I said, “What’s OR?” I had no idea what it meant. That wasn’t how I wanted to end my freshmen football season but I still had a blast that year and I was ready to come back next year and make plays on Friday nights.