The Football Unit in High School Gym Class That Changed My Life

A little confidence can go a long way

Image by Walter Rhein

In the greater scheme of things, this story doesn’t mean a whole lot. However, the events I’m about to describe have had a major impact on my life and changed how I viewed the world forever.

I was a freshman in high school and we were entering a football unit in gym class. I wasn’t excited about it because we’d be playing out on the football field and I knew we’d be hitting the dirt a lot.

The field consisted of the occasional tuft of grass sticking out of what felt like kiln-hardened mud. If we were lucky, we emerged from the locker room to find they’d aerated the field and left little plugs all over the place. That didn’t really soften things up, but we imagined it did so it had a placebo effect.

I knew I could hold my own at football because I’d often played games at family gatherings with my overenthusiastic uncles. However, I didn’t think I was any good because my father was perpetually disappointed in my abilities.

My father always liked to emphasize how bad I was at everything, but he did it in a weird way. If I made a catch he disregarded it like an outlier data point that contradicted a predetermined conclusion. He liked to focus on the moments where I screwed up.