It was the first week of summer football camp and I just came back from California. I arrive at the field at 8 AM. The practice seemed similar to the off-season training. My neighbor and other people would tell me that are you sure you want to play football? It’s a hard sport you know. At first, I didn’t really listen. They described it as ¨hell week¨ The first week passed, and I thought this was going to be a walk in the park. I underestimated the sport and it taught me a lesson.

The second week came around and I woke up to the birds chirping. When I woke up I felt like I was going to school it didn’t really feel like summer break to me. Probably cause this was my first time playing a team sport. My dad dropped me off and I walked over to the field where we were all getting ready and starting to warm up. We jog one lap around the field do our drills for the positions that we each play and just learn the basics. We were doing the same thing until Friday. At the end of practice, the coach told us we were going to start conditioning.

When we started conditioning I didn’t think too much of it and so did other new teammates. I thought we would just run short distances for a good minute. Our coach told us to line up on the end field he then told us we were running the entire field front to back he also said no jogging. At this point, I felt like I was going to be challenged mentally and physically and I was right. He split us into bigs and skilled, skilled were the light guys and bigs were the linemen and some linebackers. We began running and I felt good, 3 more laps ran by and I was already starting to feel tired. I started to breathe heavily and the coach gave us a couple of seconds to catch our breath. I was still out of breath. After another lap coach said,  “5 more…” I didn’t think I would finish it and felt like throwing up, but it’s all a mental thing thinking you’re not tired is going to trick your body. After that day of conditioning and other days, it really matured me changed my perspective on sports, and also changed my mentality. I called those days ¨Satan’s playground.¨