When my parents divorced and things started crashing down around me two years ago, I had a lot of pain and anger left inside, and of course being a guy, I wasn’t going to cry about it, so I went to my first football camp that summer. The first day of camp, we ran 10 laps of the field–

just to warm up. The rest of the day I spent using up what I had inside, not knowing if what was inside was limitless or not. I went home after 5 hours of running exhausted in all ways possible and I went to sleep and woke up the next morning barely able to move. As I sat there on my bed I had some time to think about how I felt the day before when I was playing, how alive I felt, and how I could actually use my problems to make success in something else. Even though I felt like a truck had hit me, I got up, got dressed for the camp, and went back, and I’ve been playing ever since. Football has taught me how to use anger, fear, aggression, and pain, and turn it into something that makes me feel alive or energized.

More importantly, Football has taught me not to quit. Out of all the sports I’ve played in my life, nothing requires the will power that a football player needs to survive. Probably the hardest practice in my life was the time one of our teammates disrespected a coach and they made us all pay for it. We had to sprint 20 yards forward, stop, do 10 push ups, turn around, run back 10, stop, do ten sit ups, and repeat for the length of the football field, end zone to end zone. It turned out to be only 300 yards of sprinting, but the stopping and going killed us, along with the 100 push ups and sit ups. Five or six times while I did this drill, I started thinking this is too hard just stop walk off the field. Then one of our coaches started telling us the story of how the marine recruits are trained. During their six months of recruit camp, they have this week called Hell Week, and during this week, they do not sleep for more then a total of eight hours. They run them, yell at them, shoot around them, and make them stand in the ocean in the middle of the night in nothing but their under garments. What is particularly cruel about standing in the ocean at night (and the water is at hypothermic temperatures), is that the instructors have a big bonfire on the shore with blankets and hot chocolate, and they actually encourag

Some topics in this essay:
BOOM†Captain’s, Law School, Hell Week, , I’ll I’ll, playing football, field field, push ups, football taught, rest lives, i’ve faced, war life, sit ups, football camp,