I’m very thankful that I was born into a family that is really into sports. Both of my parents were into tennis as teenagers. My mom is a huge Georgia Bulldogs football fan. Which automatically makes the rest of my family Georgia Bulldogs football fans as well. I have two younger brothers, both of which have played baseball ever since tee ball. My dad coached my brothers and I for many years whether it was for the team that we played or just being in the yard tossing the ball around. My middle brother was a third baseman and a pitcher during his high school playing career. He was the number one pitcher in the rotation as a senior and has a nasty curve balls, and no I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother. I know it had to be a hard decision for him to make but he choose to hang up his glove and cleats after high school and not play college ball, but with his engineering major it would be very hard to play ball and keep up with studies at the same time. So I respect his decision. My younger brother, who will be a senior in high school in the fall, is a third baseman, and has been selected to play on a travel ball team during this summer, His team is playing in tournaments all over the southeast, He is looking to get exposure because he wants to play baseball in college. Which will be a great accomplishment when he makes it. I am very proud of both of my brothers athletic accomplishments. Loving sports just runs in my family and I don’t know what we would do without sports.
Growing up my overall favorite athlete was the quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys from 1989 to 2000, Troy Aikman. He made me a Dallas Cowboys fan. Sadly I have lost my interest in the Cowboys nowadays. Sorry Tony Romo, But Troy is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time. Troy made me want to be a quarterback so bad. But with Spina Bifida the doctors said I would risk my health too much to play. So that dream was striped away in instant. Which was very disappointing to me. Being the quarterback was my dream. I remember playing “pick-up” games. I would always to be the “all-time” quarterback. I thought I was pretty good. So that was fun. But it just wasn’t the High School quarterback. So the next sport I got into was baseball. It gave me hope that I could still do the sports thing. It made me feel as normal as I could. All my teammates treated me the same as they treated everyone else. Which made me feel good because I don’t like it when people treat me different. I stopped playing baseball when I was about ten years old, because it started getting really hard for me to compete with the other players. But that year my team won the division. I don’t claim to have helped in the winning of the trophy. But it is on my shelf.
After my time “attempting” to play baseball was over. I was introduced to wheelchair sports. This is when the heavens shown down on me. It took me too long to find out that I was eligible to play wheelchair sports with my disability. I had no idea. I started playing wheelchair sports in middle school. Basketball was my favorite. I was able to play in that league for about 6 years. In this particular league you can to play up until high school graduation. But I had a great time in it playing sports such as wheelchair basketball, wheelchair soccer, wheelchair football, and Track. Starting out all of the wheelchair sports are hard, but basketball was probably the hardest, from having the stamina to make it through a game, to learning the different rules in wheelchair basketball to actually getting the ball to the hoop let alone through the hoop. Its a lot harder than it looks. I have traveled to numerous places to play wheelchair sports which include, a wheelchair soccer national championship tournament in San Diego, California. A traveling wheelchair basketball team funded by Evander Holifield(I never got to meet him), on which I played point guard in a national championship tournament at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. I hate that I didn’t learn about this travel wheelchair basketball team sooner because with exposure from that team I could’ve got noticed and maybe played some college wheelchair basketball The closest college wheelchair basketball team is the University of Alabama and I wouldn’t have had any problem yelling “Roll Tide!”. But I will never know because that opportunity is sadly gone now. That would’ve been awesome though. I also played in multiple state championship wheelchair basketball games at Gwinnett Arena. I played a wheelchair basketball game before a Atlanta Hawks game at Phillips Arena. I have attended an Atlanta Falcons training camp day and got to meet and get stuff signed from quite a few former and current Falcons players, including Michael Vick. While I was in the hospital, I got to meet some of the University of Georgia football players, and some former Atlanta Thrashers players. I have had so many amazing opportunities involving sports that more than likely would not have ever happened without me being born with Spina Bifida. I am very thankful for those opportunities.
Since my years of playing sports have now come to an end I have always wanted to get back involved in them but as a coach, preferably basketball. I think I would be good at it as I am very knowledgeable of the game and it definitely would be lots of fun for me. I have gained a huge amount of interest in basketball over the past few years. College basketball in particular, because the players are playing it for the love of the game (for the most part). When I started watching college basketball I gravitated towards one team, The Duke University Blue Devils, they are at the top of the rankings every year. I try to go see them play when they come to Atlanta to play the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. I also saw them play in the NCAA tournament regional semifinals against LSU at the Georgia Dome, But my dream is to go watch them play at their home court, Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The head coach of the Blue Devils, Mike Krzyzewski, also known as Coach K, is one of the greatest basketball coaches of all time at any level. He is currently the second most winning-est college basketball coach of all time with nine-hundred career wins. He is definitely a coach I look up to. He has inspired me to check out the coaching side of sports. I don’t care to be as successful at coaching as he is I would be happy just to get the chance to volunteer with a local high school basketball team or on one of my former wheelchair basketball teams. It would be an amazing opportunity to fulfill a dream that I have had for a couple years now. I’m going to explore the options over the next few months before the next basketball season begins and see where it goes. Hopefully someone will give me the opportunity to fulfill that dream. I really don’t care what I have to do to help out a team anything from giving out waters during the game to handing the players towels as they come off the court to keeping the statistic book during games would be fine with me. Just to be out there on the court and being a part of something like that would make it all worth it for me.
