How Has Football Influenced Me

For many people who have participated in athletics either at the middle school, high school, or college level their greatest inspiration and motivation has come from one of their coaches. I, certainly, was no different.

While that influence usually will come in the form of something encouraging and constructive, sometimes, the lessons learned resulted in something much less helpful or reassuring.

After all the years I’ve spent coaching, I believe that I’ve learned as much, if not more, from taking mental notes watching ‘questionable’coaching and realizing that their way wasn’t the way I ever wanted to do things.

An important example of this occurred during my freshman year of high school at the Norwich Free Academy (NFA) in Norwich, Connecticut. While I thoroughly enjoying my first season of cross country, my first love was baseball and I couldn’t wait for the first day of spring practice to begin. Since I was six years old, I had played the game and each year up until high school I became more and more confident of my

His baseball skills were below average at best. He didn’t hit or run well and could only catch a fly ball if it was hit right to him. So, what did he have that I didn’t? While, I may be wrong, in my humble opinion, along with a few of my teammates, if your father teaches in the same building as the coach does, apparently that might influence the amount of your playing time.

What became almost comical was that from time to time, his sometimes inept play in the field caused the coach an obvious case of frustration and heartburn overload. After not playing in any of those first four games, the coach finally inserted me into the lineup for, as he called it back then, “defensive measures.” When that occurred, I knew I had to try to make something good happen in order to get the coach’s attention and hopefully allow me more playing