Play each game like it’s your last

I decided early on in my life that I liked sports. My dad had me playing on a little league tee ball team by the time I was five years old.

I moved up the age levels and played more advanced ball all the way until the age of 13. I subsequently tried out for Curry’s middle school and high school teams at different ages and didn’t make the cut, so I was done with baseball, or it was done with me — some combination thereof.

I played two years of Toy Bowl football as well, so switching to high school football only seemed natural. After my time on the gridiron was over I decided that covering sports was the next best to playing them.

This leads to a problem that has haunted me for four years now: I miss playing sports. Watching prep baseball makes me want to put on a pair of batting gloves and swing for the fences. Prep football is even worse, as every time I watch it I want to be back out on the field, even for one night.

The craving to play ball even makes me consider flag football and slow pitch softball, anything to end my craving to play something.

I don’t know when or if I will ever play organized sports again, but I honestly hope the answer is I will.

I write this as a message/warning for the teenagers playing high school sports now. Do not take what you play for granted, because before you know it it’s gone, and you will never get the chance again.

Enjoy what you play while it lasts. I would entreat any sport playing high schoolers that may be reading this — though I imagine that to be a low number — to play like each game is your last, because eventually it will be.

I will never forget the night that Cordova beat our football team. It was the coldest night of my life, and at one point my hands were so numb I couldn’t button my chinstrap or even put in my mouth guard.

We lost in miserable fashion, and that will remain the outcome of the last game I ever played, and I have to live with that for the rest of my life.

It leaves a bad taste in your mouth for sure to lose the last game you ever play in, but at the end of the day I would gladly get beat again to have one last shot at putting the pads on.

I also wish I could have played baseball a little longer, but I was a big guy and a terrible hitter. I like what I do now, but I will always remember playing sports.