In honor of Sunday and our greatest American sport, football (screw you baseball!), I'm going to tell some high school football stories. Here ya go @pipercadence
My freshman year of football, we practiced on a small field that was across from the actual football field. It was called the Bowl, because of the way the roads next to it were, it sat below on three sides. So towards the far side of the Bowl was a little hill, that rose sharply up at least 45 degrees if not a little more. In addition to all the sprints and Indian runs and the normal conditioning that the coaches had for us, they had something special for when we screwed up badly. We would run up that hill, touch the treeline maybe 10 feet up or so, and then come back down. The coaches would bl0w the whistle for you to go up, so it wasn't a continuous run. You had to reset every time, making sure you didn't lag too far behind. Now the hill was so steep that you had to make a severe effort not to just tumble forward on the way down. One fine day, we had a terrible practice, where everyone was screwing up and the effort was not where it was supposed to be. That day, we ran over 100 hills, as we called them, up and down and up and down. I forget the final number that we ran, but my vague memory says somewhere around 150. As far as I know, that's still the record at the school for most hills ran. I'm oddly proud about that.
Another funny story was from my senior year, during my best game as a football player. It was towards the very end of the game, and we were being beaten, where it wasn't in question the other team was going to win. So the coaches were putting in depth guys to get them a little experience. So one of the guys in question, an excitable sophomore named Joe, was supposed to come in for Beau, a senior. We were huddled up, and it was very quiet both on the field and in the stands. When Joe comes in to substitute, he screams at the top of his lungs, "BEAU!!!!!!!!!" Everyone, both teams and the crowd, just turned around in shock as he screamed during complete quiet. I almost died laughing.
Another story that I really like to tell is about a drill we were running in practice and a guy named Mike. Now Mike was not the most well-liked guy for three reasons: 1. He though much better of himself as a player than he was. 2. He would never admit it. 3. He never shut up. Now he always liked to talk himself up because he started on the offensive line our senior year, mostly because he was one of the few genuinely big guys we had. He thought he was a lot tougher than he was. So the drill we were doing in practice was an anchoring drill, where a guard would come pull at you and you had to brace yourself and anchor and not get washed out of the play. So during this particular drill, Mike was lined up as the guard pulling and I was the guard anchoring. He came around to pull, and I sunk my hips and popped him real good with my shoulder. I ended up not moving at all. He ended up taking himself out of practice because his shoulder hurt so bad. I got quite a few claps on the back from my teammates for that one.
So those are probably my best football stories. I've got a few others, but they're more general and not really about specific events and such. God bless football. Amen
