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Nice move As Yogi Berra said, “It’s 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.” Every coach I ever played under emphasized the mental part of the game. Regardless of the sport, the coaches worked us with hours and hours of drills in “real game situations.” In my sophomore year of high school, I was the football team’s quarterback. We were 27 yards from the goal line, and we called a “student body left, quarterback bootleg right.” I faked the handoff, and the linebacker who keyed on me looked at me for a second and headed the opposite direction where everyone else was going. I took off with nothing but green pasture between me and a touchdown. Then I saw a lone defender on the 2-yard-line. Instead of doing what I had been trained to do (head fake, stutter step, roll, run away at an angle), I somehow decided it would be a more glorious score to plant my left cleats in the chest of that defender. As everyone cheered, I leapt toward the end zone, and ran right into that defender who promptly tackled me on the 2-yard-line. The exhilaration from the sidelines turned into groans. My coach was smiling (but not happy) and yelling, “Why did you do that? Why didn’t you head fake… or something?” All of those practices! All those drills. And now just mental anguish. I really don’t know why. Michael Allen, Indian Trail, Union Power Cooperative |
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