Dear middle school Grady,
I could write to you until I'm an adult, and I'm only a few years older than you. You're probably at practice or at a game right now, because the grind doesn't stop. Keep going and pursue what you enjoy doing. You'll learn that winning and just sports isn't everything, make someone's day!
The very first football practice that I remember was in pee wee football and I tackled someone when I wasn't supposed to, so we ran most of the practice. I had felt so bad for my teammates that I was the reason that we ran all practice. I didn’t like the feeling in my stomach and let me tell you those were the worst laps around a field I've ever been a part of.
That is when I learned that I needed to listen to everything my coach told me.
There was one time on our bus ride over to our middle school game against our rival Warsaw, our coach had let us know that at the end of the game we had to let a kid with some type of disability score a touchdown. The game had gone by and I can't remember if we won or lost, but that's not the morale of the story. There was around a minute left and I believed we were winning by quite a bit and it was time that we fake dive for the player and let him score. “Set hut” said the opposing quarterback, he handed it off with no surprise to us. He had “broken” several tackles and juked his way into the endzone for his first ever touchdown. This made me feel awesome inside. Yes, I think we won, but that's not the only reason I was happy. We had just let a kid with a disability score a touchdown. This is when I realized not all people are the same and some people have more privileges than others. I had realized how cool it was and how it probably made that kid’s day so much better by us just letting him score a simple touchdown.
That same year, I realized that some people play sports for fun of course but some people use it as an escape from life. I realized this has changed my view on sports in many ways. I have realized that not everyone has it easy, not everyone has two parents that are there to support them, not everyone has rides to practices and games, not everyone has it the same as you, not everyone has good home lives. This is where I realized, wow, I just need to be nice to everyone because you don't know what they go through in their life. Some of my teammates in sports hid their home life very well and tried making everyone's day better, it's just as simple as being nice to everyone that could make someone's day. And obviously, winning games would help as well. I had experienced this because I knew some of my teammates had rough home lives and they played sports as their escape. Some of them, if you didn’t know them you wouldn't be able to tell that they had rough home lives or split up parents or anything like that.
So if you don't know the person it's just as easy as being nice to them because you don't know how or what they deal with.
Now, these are my years where I realized the game was more than just sports. My teammates and friends and coaches taught me how different sports are for everyone. I now know how there are just so many different types of people that have many different reasons why they play sports.
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