Football is back! Look, I get it. We can’t go grocery shopping without wearing a mask; however, big sweaty football players get to hit one another running full speed while not wearing a mask. Do I understand it? No. Am I okay with it? YES!
While watching one of the several games I was interested in this weekend, I sat back and thought about my time playing football back in high school. The glory days. Well, there wasn’t much glory in them actually...or was there?
I played football for my high school from seventh grade all the way through my senior year. We tried hard. We lifted weights, conditioned in the humid South Carolina heat and even traveled to out of state 7-on-7 competitions. Our lack of success wasn’t from a lack of trying.
But that’s just it. We didn’t have a lot of success on the field.
After four wins our junior season, many were optimistic about my senior class’ campaign. We were a younger team but had some talent at the skilled positions. We had performed well at 7-on-7 competitions that summer and were prepared to win more games than the previous season.
SPOILER ALERT: That didn’t happen.
Instead we lost every-single-game that season. On a positive note, our coach said that we were the nicest football team in America! We went 0-10 overall and 0-6 in our league. Our opponents outscored us by 300 points (seriously; I added it up: 345 to 45).
The season ended with a loss to our bitter rival from up the road, Loris High School by a score of 14-0. I left that game with about six minutes to go in the fourth quarter after taking a hard hit on a post route over the middle. The final minutes ticked away from my last year of eligibility as I watched from the sidelines.
That sucked.
It was after this game that our coach, Jody Jenerette, gave a speech that I remember all these fourteen years later. After the loss, with the entire team gathered around, he took a moment to look at each of us. The message was this…
God was preparing us for something. Something difficult was up ahead in our future. Maybe it was cancer, maybe it was a death in the family, maybe divorce...but something was going to be difficult. And it was that difficulty that God was preparing us for.
And I believed him.
To this day I think about that talk. I think about how true it was. That winless season was tough; however, it was only preparing us for what life would throw at us. I’m just speaking for me, but that winless season taught me how to deal with defeat and take it head on. I learned that the taste of defeat isn’t something that I enjoy. I learned that I can lose a battle, wake up the next day, and continue on with the war.
We weren’t losers because we lost, we were winners because we didn’t quit.
That’s life. You aren’t going to win every single day. Shoot, you may not get a victory for a few months. But as long as you persevere and keep at it, you’re a winner. You’re going to lose in life. A loved one will pass away, your heart will be broken, someone else will get the best of you, you’re going to get sick and end the end, we will all lose a battle to death at some point or another.
A loss doesn’t make you a loser. Never giving up makes you a champion.
I guess that season wasn’t a total loss afterall.
Happy Fryeday!
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