February 2022

“Every athlete dream, few athletes reality.”

Letter from an Agonized Athlete

Perhaps it is simple for those who have never felt the agonizing anxiety of an athlete to say “Making it is easy”. But, when you have seen perfect players end their high school career with no offers and concerned coaches, fight for their players rights to continue their passion; when you have seen heartless recruiters lie, bait, and even con kids out of their future; when you see the immeasurable number of athletes teetering on the edge of giving up in the center of a society that admires athletes;when you constantly find your mind misguided and your hope haunted as you start you realize you have to tell your parents why they will not be able to move out of the low-income household that you had promised years prior and see sorrow fill their face as they realize they cannot watch their athlete play in a stadium that wondered their mind for their whole life; when you have to fabricate an answer for your family members asking: “When are you going to the league and when are you going to make your millions?”;when you take a cross country flight and find it necessary to spend thousand after thousand in overpriced beds of a hotel because these tournaments and camps are crucial; when you are agonized day in and day out by persistent post reading “committed” and “signed”;when your first name becomes “unachieved”, your middle name becomes “lazy” (no matter how hard you worked) and your last name becomes “incompetent” and your mother and father are never given the deserved title of “College parents”when you are determined by day and hesitant by night by the fact you aren’t going to make it, living undoubtedly at anxious stance, never quite knowing what is coming in the mail, and are afflicted with inner confusion and outer aching;when you are forever fighting a deteriorating sense of “accomplishment”–then you will comprehend why we feel it is difficult to make it.