A Dream Too Big by Caylin Louis Moore

Author:Caylin Louis Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

5

QUESTION: “How will you make the most of this opportunity?”

I knew my education would continue after Verbum Dei, but midway through my senior year it was still unclear where. Applying to colleges had been frustrating, with a lot of empty promises and disappointments. During the spring of my junior year, I had been pulled out of class on different days by the coaches of Penn, Princeton, and Dartmouth. They all said nice things about my academic record and football potential. They all said how much they would love to have me in their programs. Then, one by one, they all flew home and seemed to forget how to use email. I never heard from them again, and they didn’t respond when I reached out.

Marist College became the most appealing option. The school was solid academically, I could play football there, and, most important of all, I would be able to get out of Los Angeles and grow as a person while away from home. I liked the students I had met, and the campus was pretty and charming. Even though I had been accepted to more prestigious schools like UCLA and Boston College, meeting the tuition and expenses for those schools wasn’t going to be possible, even with the scholarships I’d won and adding in whatever I could make working at a part-time job. At Marist, the combination of financial aid and scholarships would cover my tuition, books, lodging, and food, just like a full-ride scholarship. I wouldn’t have to work and could focus completely on school and football.

That was important to me, because I wanted to go get it when it came to college. I was just as driven as I had been at Verbum Dei, if not more. I treated all educational opportunities—whether it was Marist, another college, or later, the Rhodes Scholarship—as apprenticeships in life. I always saw them as ways to gather practical knowledge, life lessons, and worldly experience that I could bring back to my community. All educational experiences were going to translate to full pages in my Book of Wisdom. It didn’t matter where, or when, or what the opportunity for learning was. If an “old head,” a term to denote one of my elders, had some wisdom that he learned in politics or in prison, I wanted to know. If a homeless man had a clever way to stay warm at night, I wanted to learn how he did it.

So my options came down to this: enroll in Marist or go to a larger college and walk onto the football team with nothing more than the possibility that I could earn a role and pay my way. Still, I was hesitant. Marist felt like a step down from my dreams of going to an Ivy or playing for a Division I school. Because he had always been a good source of advice and inspiration, I called Coach Tony a couple of days before the signing deadline for student athletes. Sitting in my grandma’s

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