Reflection on a Season
April 4, 2009 — wrjohnson74
The following is a speech that I wrote for a football banquet while I was a coach. Although the season wasn’t great, it was not the games that I cared to remember.
My job takes me to some different places during the week, and this past week I happened on some familiar ground. I took a left off of Hwy 25 in London KY and drove through Levi Jackson State Park. On the other side of the park is a long stretch of road fronted by an iron arch that reads J.M. Feltner 4-H Camp. I took a left underneath the arch and onto the road that bisects dense forest on either side. I could almost see the lights of Coach Burton’s Golf cart coming at me following Craig and Randall as they lumbered in the cool 5:00 am morning air. I drove by the ecoli infested pond that a few of the Bullitt East players thought would be a refreshing swim. I then pulled around the cafeteria to the fields where it seemed that whistles still echoed. The grass had grown back over the places where cleats wore them down to bare earth, and the PVC piped goal posts still stood awaiting the next group of players. But it wasn’t this main field where I hold my fondest memory, rather tucked away from site is a smaller field maybe 35 yards wide and 50 yards long and this is the place where a picture will remain suspended in time for me. Coach Hensley and I were standing at the very back of the field so we could view our players warming up. As I looked through them I could see all of the other teams doing their various drills. The sun was setting over the tree line and the gold and amber hues of its rays were caught by the dust cloud that had settled over the entire camp making the image seem sepia toned. All the teams looked ragged in their torn and bloodied practice jerseys. I turned to Coach Hensley and said, “If you took a picture of this scene and hung it up in your office no one would be able to tell you what era that the picture was taken.” This image seems to summarize my experience coaching football, and I think everyone in this room has a picture of a moment in their mind that captures an experience or a period of your life; the look of your kid’s face as he wakes you up with so much excitement Christmas morning, the smell the house on a Thanksgiving afternoon with the sound of football echoing through the house, the smell of a locker room after a hard practice, or friends just sitting around talking about nothing. These images can be powerful in the way we remember things in our life. That picture I have of that practice summarizes the timelessness of football, not just the sport itself but of the things that it has taught millions of players that have played the game, and the pictures in time that it gives each of us. These memories we have should be cherished and reflected upon periodically through our lives, but should not be something we try to relive. Cherish the memories of your son’s football years, players cherish the memories of your playing experience reflect on it often when the world seems to suck you up in its reality. My friends 7 year old son came up to me and said, “Do you know that the moon isn’t bright itself, that it takes the sun to shine on it to make it bright in the night?’ I said, “Yes.” And he followed by saying “Do you know what happens when the moon gets dark?” I said no just to see where he was going with this new found information, and he said, “The world gets in the way.” I thought to myself what a profound statement in so many levels. Sometimes the world will get in the way. It will try to get in the way of our happiness, of our sense of right and wrong, and our sense of who we are. Football will be one of the memories that you will reflect back on but not the only one. There are many that you already have and so many more that will be created in the future. I challenge you to pay attention to those things that are so special in life.
