Don’t know about anyone else, but what I learned is don’t play football if you’re short high school freshman who weighs 115 pounds.
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...