Walk On by Ben Malcolmson & Patti McCord & Pete Carroll

Author:Ben Malcolmson & Patti McCord & Pete Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

11

Boom!

It is certainly not unusual for a college student to wake up in a strange place with no recollection of how he got there. But when I found myself standing on the sideline in the middle of practice, instead of running plays on the field where I belonged, I was baffled. Taking a quick inventory, I discovered that all my limbs were still attached, so whatever happened must not have been that serious. But man, my head hurt.

I tried to focus on the field, but instead of the standard eleven guys on each side of the ball, it looked like each player now had a double and they were all moving in extremely slow motion. And for some reason, although it was a sunny day, a thick blanket of fog had mysteriously settled over the practice field. Light seemed to intensify the throbbing in my head, so I closed my eyes, hoping that the muddled feeling would go away. It was as if my brain cells had been hopelessly scattered and were desperately trying to find their way home.

This wasn’t the first time I had taken a hard hit, since we were already two weeks into practice. A few days earlier I had been running a kickoff coverage drill where my assignment was to sprint down the field and get around six-foot, 250-pound Oscar Lua and six-two, 230-pound Brad Walker on my way to tackling the ball carrier. At 165 pounds, I was outweighed by over 300 pounds. Picture a Chihuahua taking on a Doberman pinscher.

No, make that two Doberman pinschers.

I knew we were going to run the drill multiple times, and although I was fairly sure it probably wasn’t going to end well, I ran down the field as fast as I could each time and prayed for a different outcome.

I felt like Charlie Brown, who ran up to kick the football thinking that this time, Lucy might actually leave it in place. But every time, he landed flat on his back. After six trips down the field, where I ended up exactly like Charlie Brown each time, on trip number seven, Lua and Walker smirked at me while offering this advice: “Next time slow down before you get here, and we’ll take it easy on you.”

My notebook entry from that day read, “I’m still lost and getting yelled at a lot now.”

Not only was my body being battered at practice; my introduction to the weight room brought a whole new kind of pain. Since in fifth grade we were too young to pump iron, I had never really set foot in a weight room before, unless I count the handful of times I walked through the weight room to get to track practice in high school.

I stood wide eyed and gawked at row upon row of gleaming silver weight machines. There were dozens of different machines with racks and weights and pulleys as well as dumbbells and barbells and kettlebells and a bunch of equipment I could not identify.

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