New Beginnings

One morning early this week, I fell in behind a U-Haul truck pulling a car, going somewhere. I can only imagine where. A new town. A new home. A new job. Somewhere.

I remember those days. In 1977, my U-Haul truck was filled with all we owned and parked outside the MidSouth Coliseum in Memphis where I was graduating. We walked out of graduation and drove to our new home in Maryville.

We made a couple more of those U-Haul truck moves, to Bluefield, West Virginia then back home to Maryville to stay. Each time, the trip was filled with change and adventure.

Now this is how my brain works—I wondered how that could become a column, a lesson for this space.

And I thought about high school juniors at the end of their season. The next time they are in games, it will be their senior season. They will be the leaders. This will be the year that they always dreamed of.

The best of those start immediately. I can remember when you worked out in the summer before school started in the fall and that was about it. Not anymore.

When the season is over, take a day, maybe two. At most a week. And then get started in preparation for the next go-round. That’s where success is bred.

It’s a new journey. A new adventure. Just like that U-Haul truck headed out.

A new opportunity to get things right. I can remember retired MHS football coach David Ellis telling his young charges in the last week of the season, usually the week of the state championship game, that they had one more chance to get it right.

They would then go through the same drills that they had been doing for weeks, months even. It was still all about footwork and execution.

What a lot of people don’t see is all the time and effort that happens when people aren’t looking. The practices. The many hours in the weight room. Early mornings on the track. A thousand free throws in an empty gym.

It didn’t used to be that way. Back in the dark ages, when I was a teenager, a few of us lifted weights but most depended on farm work to get strong. Shoveling grain and lifting bales of hay. We called it “country strong” and it worked pretty well.

But anybody that thinks we were bigger, stronger, faster, and better trained back then is merely foolish. Kids today have better training, better nutrition, and greater opportunities than we ever had.

Take my tennis playing grandson for example. I played a lot of tennis growing up but there weren’t even public courts in my hometown. The owners of the two private courts in town allowed us to play in their backyards.

All we had to do is keep the noise down and sweep the courts from time to time. We could only dream of an actual tennis lesson. We were our own teachers.

My tennis player has played all winter, going to Knoxville for practice in indoor courts there. He has the benefit of excellent coaches and a granddad that will take him out a couple of times a week just to hit a hopper of balls.

Others have travel teams and position coaches and opportunities that we never even dreamed of. They are on a journey that hopefully leads to happiness and success. Just like those folks in that U-Haul truck.