Everyone has something in their life they cannot live without and mine just so happens to be football. I live and breathe the game. Everything in my life revolves around football and the only chance of me ever strapping a helmet up again is if a college recruits me to play. I’ve worked the majority of my life to have the opportunity to play at the next level and after having a junior and senior season with a total of two wins, I wanted this chance so much more. However failure shaped me to push myself to become the best athlete I could be no matter how hard the rest of my teammates work.
   

While I struggled through my senior year as all my friends transferred to a better school or quit the team, I contemplated and asked myself if it was even worth the failure each and every week. I thought about the seven year old me walking out on a football field for a first time when I first fell in love with the game and instantly remembered why I never left. As I walked out of the locker room to play our rival school for the last time, my coach pulled me aside and told me “no matter what happens tonight it’s been a pleasure to coach you”. Hearing those words made all the failure worth it.

It was an average Friday night under the lights and I still recall walking out on the field for the final game of my high school career. We had no chance to win and the whole town ruled us out of this game. The newspaper predicted the score to be a shutout and said that there was no chance we’d even be able to score on a team that was thought to be in the state championship. Well their predictions weren’t wrong, the first play of the game the other team intercepted a pass and scored and from there on everyone put us out of the game. We ended up losing 70-7 that night. Football taught me to keep my head up no matter what is thrown my way and to continue you to fight through the adversity put in front of me. Even at a young age it’s taught me to be mature and have respect for everything and everyone because it’s put me in tough situations where I could either back down or stand up and face the “elephant in the room”.

The lessons learned through failure have taught me life skills that I’ll carry throughout the rest of my life. While being able to pursue excellence in my studies and my daily life because failure showed me the only way to beat it is to face it and hit it head on. Failure is the only reason anyone has success because you might be fine with winning all the time but that one time you lose and you’ve never lost in life before it will devastate you and all the success will go spiralling down the drain because you couldn’t hold your head up long enough to get through the failure of losing one simple battle of the journey of life. The time will come when that one thing you can’t live without is gone and if you don’t move on from it you’ll get left behind and you have to know when it’s time to let go and move on or keep fighting for what you love.