Posted on 07/29/2015 12:11:04 PM PDT by Kaslin
Yup.
The cheapest game in the world to play is soccer, all you need is a ball.
Homeless kids in Brazil play it and become world-class players. But in this country to develop a decent soccer player costs an arm and leg.
I weighed 105 lbs as a freshman. Everybody who went out made the freshman team...because they needed bodies. The head coach decided at 105 lbs I was a lineman. I was the second string right guard. The backs outweighed me by twenty pounds.
One scrimmage I tried to block one of defensive players during an end sweep. I took a running start at the guys chest and hit him full force....and bounced back ten feet landing on my back. As I was lying on the ground I noticed the def. player (a kid from my grade school) was laughing at me. That's when I knew for sure I had no future as a football player.
I loved playing football, even though I wasn’t that good at it...as a young teenage boy, there isn’t much more fun than running down a field at full speed and trying to lay a hit on someone. Sigh, yeah, I hurt myself playing football too, but...heck, I have hurt myself doing a bunch of other things too.
When I was playing high school football, I was new to the area, and tried out for varsity. I wanted to impress the coach (never played formal football) so I tried to make up with aggressiveness what I lacked in knowledge or skill.
The coach knew I had never played, so he was trying to figure out where I might work out (I was 5’9” and weighted about 155)
He tried me at running back, so on one play I was lead blocker around the end, and as I came running full speed at a guy who weighed a good 40 lbs more than me running at me full speed, I figured if I used leverage and technique, I could stop the guy.
He obviously had the same idea, but also had a lot more experience. When two immovable objects meet, the one with less mass loses. That would be me. My spine probably shrunk an inch, and I have paid for that lack of knowledge ever since. After practice, we had to run laps, and I couldn’t run or even walk, but I was gritting my teeth and trying to finish even though everyone else was gone, and the coach had to come out and tell me to call it a day...
A lot of liberals hate football. It is masculine, and females cannot share the field with men...the field cannot be “leveled”.
Not to say many liberals don’t enjoy football, because they do, but the committed, ideological ones cannot abide it. It is why they love soccer, if any sport.
The war on boys and men demands the abolition of football.
That picture of your son says all about football that I love, and liberals hate.
Sounds pretty much like my experience.
At that age, I figured I was indestructible.
I was wrong.
I had plenty of enthusiasm, but I got bounced here and crushed there. I learned a lot about the laws of physics.
Next year, I went out for soccer.
I learned so much more than just how to play football...
I learned how to reach deep within myself to push my physical abilities past what I thought I could do...
As an example: our freshman high school coach had us run either 40 - 100 yard sprints or 100 - 40 yard sprints everyday at the end of practice...
If the opposing teams scored any points during the game we had to run a mile for every point they scored after the game !!!
I'm sure in today's environment he would be arrested for child abuse...
He did turn us into a bunch of tough SOB's
One time I went and watched the football team play the best team in the area. The other team drew from a twenty mile radius and had the biggest and best athletes in the region. These were eight graders, and some of those kids from the other team were pretty big. The size/weight advantage between our team and theirs was patently noticeable in favor of the other team.
They beat our team easily, but what was disconcerting to me was three of our players had to leave the game after sustaining concussions or other injuries.
That's the problem with football. Small(er) players can really get hurt bad. Enthusiasm only goes so far.
Nothing, it distracts us from real issues!
So true! In NYS, we even had a Assemblyman who proposed a bill to ban youth football. Fortunately, it died in the "very conservative" State Senate.
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