High School Sports

Heather and Eric ditched me tonight, so after putting the kids to bed and cleaning up the mess they'd made I settled in on the couch and watched Remember the Titans. One of my top 5 favorite movies of all times, i get goosebumps every time i watch it. I love it, for a lot of reasons. Tonight while i was watching it, it got me thinking back to and reminiscing about high school sports and how much i miss them! Those were the glory days, I wish i'd made more out of them than i did.

I always got pre-game/pre-race jitters...always. It didn't matter that i'd done it a thousand times before, it never failed i always felt like puking before it all started. I miss that feeling though. It was always an excited puking feeling, like even though i was terrified, at the same time i couldn't wait to get out there. Always as soon as the whistle blew or the race started though, within seconds all the jittery feelings were gone and replaced with a purely euphoric feeling like..."yeah, i'm going to rock this!" which sometimes i did and sometimes i didn't, but either way I always had fun. I miss the adrenaline rush that accompanies playing sports, the feeling when you get sort of mad or get that competitive edge and something takes over you and you just go, and play your little heart out and feel great! I can't explain it really, but at least I know what i'm talking about.

I miss practices. Being forced to work so hard that somedays that puking feeling i talked about earlier really manifested itself in the form of actual puke. I can remember one day in basketball practice, Coach Olivo was mad at us because we'd lost a game and we walked into practice and he immediately put us on the line to run suicides and told us we were running until someone puked...and we did. We ran suicides for a good 2 hours and 3 people puked in fact. It was awesome. I love forced exercise.

I loved being able to see yourself get better throughout the season. I think for me it was easiest to see in cross-country because your performance is based solely on your time. I was more motivated to beat myself each race and see if i could get a new PR or get a better time than the last race than i was by trying to beat other runners. That usually worked out okay because those 2 things sort of go hand in hand.

Playing highschool sports was the best because I got to wear my uniform (which was almost always sweats!) to school usually 4 out of the 5 days a week. Why else would I have chosen to play sports year round at school?? What's better than waking up and putting sweats on to go to school AND having your Mom not be able to say anything about it...i belive nothing! If i went to school in sweats now i'd just look lazy.

Moral of the story is, I miss high school sports. There's nothing quite like them and I wish i could go back and do them all over again. Maybe when I get back to Salt Lake I'll find an intramural soccer team of sorts to join. Granted it won't be quite the same since I won't have a coach yelling at me or practices 5 days a week to wear me out, but i suppose it'll have to do. Maybe I can talk Kat into coming to my games and yelling at me so i can get psyched up. We'll see...

Maybe I'll just become a highschool sports coach and inflict that same pain on them. I think i'd be a kick awesome coach. Although, as my girls at Heritage always told me, I'm not a very good yeller so I doubt i'd be able to scare them into playing well or doing what they're suppose to. Maybe I'm more suited as an assistant coach or assistant to the assistant....