Something I’ve really been thinking
about lately is my desire to assistant coach middle school throws. So tonight, while scrolling through my list
of “blog topics” I want to write about, my eye rested a little longer than
normal on the one about my athletic history.
I thought I could try my hand at writing out the story of how this
pudgy, big-boned Mexican became an athlete.
Let me start by saying that I was
never, ever in a club sport, little league, or after-school dance, soccer,
basketball, or anything else-team. My
reasoning behind this is that my parents were both from Mexico; new to the county, they
didn’t know what Little League was. My
parents both grew up on ranches. They
lived simple lives in rural, deep-down, nitty-gritty Mexico, and didn’t have any
luxuries, so club sports were unheard of.
Thus, my sister and I never experienced the stereotypical soccer mom,
after-school rush.
Most of my youth, I spent rather
inactive. The most exercise I got was
walking a lap at Smucker Park in Yuma,
Arizona with my mom every once in
a while. I remember in 5th
grade, my dad started taking my sister and I out in the mornings before school
with the dogs, in an effort to speed up our pre-adolescence metabolisms that
were contributing to our expanding waistlines.
I was always big. I was wearing training bras in second
grade. I was always, ALWAYS, top row,
center in every class picture. I was
5’4” and weighed 134 pounds in 4th grade, and 5’6 ½” and weighed 186
pounds at the beginning of sixth grade.
I remember being embarrassed to eat in front of my peers, beginning in 5th
and 6th grade, and continuing on through 9th grade.
But, in the spring of 6th
grade, spring of 2000, something happened.
Twice a week, during PE class, we completed a warm-up lap around the
playground, probably totaling about 300 meters or so. I think most everyone tried their hand at
jogging this lap, but nobody ever stuck with it. It became routine that my friend Cecilia and
I were the only two people in the entire class jogging that lap. We jogged the whole way around, and would
wait 5 to 10 minutes before everyone else was done. I remember I started stretching out that
semester, after I hit puberty. And I
kept jogging those laps. I think I felt
this burning desire to prove myself to my peers. I was tired of them laughing at me. I wanted to be like everyone else, and like
no one else at the same time. I wanted
to do more. I wanted to be better than
everyone walking the lap.
What I didn’t know was that this
simple act was the beginning of my athletic career.
I remember the school formed a
softball team that spring, and I kind of wanted to participate, but I
didn’t. I didn’t know anything about
softball, I was too nervous to learn more or to ask my parents, plus you had to
buy a whole bunch of equipment I had no idea about. So I didn’t play.
That fall, I tried out for my first
athletic team: 7th grade basketball.
I remember spending my fall break in the gym, running, sweating,
learning, trying. I still remember my
first free throw. It was, as we say
nowadays, an epic fail. It sort of
drifted limply out of my hand and didn’t even make it halfway to the
basket. I had absolutely no idea what I
was doing. The only thing I understood
was running up and down the court.
Running the sprints was my favorite part of tryouts.
I did not make the team. I was angry.
I was hurt. I was upset that my
fall break had gone to waste. So what
did I do? I marched back into the gym and looked at the tryout list for the
rest of the school year. I found the
dates for the track team. I said, “Fine;
I will do track. They don’t cut anyone
from the track team.”
That was, unknowingly, the most
pivotal decision of my life up to that point!
I went out for the track team that spring and threw the shot put for the
first time (in Arizona,
junior high doesn’t throw discus). I
liked it. I tried high jump. I failed at it. I tried running some 800’s and some
400’s. Something interesting about my
city was that there were weight classes for junior high. They were called “A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s”. The A’s were the big girls; the D’s were the
tiny girls. I was an “A”, and I won a
few 400m runs here and there.
I had now entered the world of the
athlete, in which, at least in junior high, if you were good at one sport, you
must be good at them all. I proceeded to
try out for and make the soccer team and volleyball team that 7th
grade year. I didn’t really like
volleyball, but felt pressure to get better at it. I remember the coach made me nervous. I ended up taking myself off the team because
I got a “D” in algebra one quarter. I
have never quit anything since.
Just before the school year ended,
we had a really cool substitute in our English class. Her name was Mrs. Fahl, and she told us
stories of her basketball playing days, showed us her college rings, and
inspired us to be better. She was then hired
on as a PE teacher, and came to me and encouraged me to sign up for Summer
League basketball. I told her I had not
made the team, but she told me she would work with me and I could get better. I asked permission from my dad and signed
up.
That summer, I fell in love with
basketball, with hard work, with running up and down the court, and with being
on a team. We won one game that summer,
but Coach Fahl worked with me on hookshots, layups, and free throws until I
could at least fake confidence in myself.
She also inspired me to use my size on the court, and planted the
“defense seed” in my brain. It was very
rare that anyone ever got around me on the court.
By this time, I had slimmed down to
about 170 pounds. I had started to
develop my muscles, and was gaining confidence.
I will never forget that I never, ever attempted softball. It was always the first sports season of the
year in junior high, and sometimes I think if I had played in 6th grade,
I could have been a year-round athlete in junior high. But, I waited patiently for basketball
season.
This time when I tried out, I made
the team. Coach Fahl was the new 8th
grade girls’ coach. Coach Foote, the 7th
grade coach, couldn’t believe how much I had improved. After basketball season, I repeated my
pattern of the year before: track, soccer, and volleyball, this time,
completing my volleyball season.
I also participated in Summer
League basketball again.
During the last semester of junior
high, Cecilia, my friend from 6th grade that I ran laps with, said
she was running “cross-country” in high school, and that I should too. By this time, I had already decided that I
wanted to attend the private Catholic high school in town, had applied, and
been accepted. I asked Cecilia to
explain what cross-country was, and she said it was “running miles”. I said I would do it.
So that summer, I ran my first 30
minute run with Coach Farr. When he
said, “We just ran about 3 miles”, I didn’t even really know what that
meant. But it was the beginning of a
beautiful high school athletic career.
For four years, I ran cross-country
in the fall, played basketball in the winter, and did track in the spring. My main event was the shot put, and I started
learning the discus as a freshman.
Occasionally, Coach Farr would throw me in the 2-mile run at track
meets, if he needed someone extra to knock somebody else’s girls out of the
running. He would only ever do this when
it didn’t interfere with my throwing events.
I also took “girls’ PE for
athletes” my sophomore, junior, and senior years as an elective. Most of my peers asked, “Didn’t you already
take PE? Why are you doing it again?” My answer? “I have to do it for track.”
I knew inside my heart that being
strong and being healthy was not just a fad for me. I knew that what most people considered a
workout, I laughed at. I knew that I
lived for running 5 miles at a time. I
knew that the road trips we had to take to compete for all three of my sports
were where I found my peace. Because we
were the private school, we didn’t have a league in town, so we had to travel a
minimum of 2 hours for every competition, during cross-country and track
seasons.
It didn’t take long to catch on
that I was serious about my sports. So
serious in fact, that it left me little time to socialize with people who
weren’t on my teams. I consider this a
blessing now because it kept me too busy to make some of the really awful and
dangerous choices that most of my peers were making (drinking, having sex,
etc). I was focused: school and
sports.
My senior year of high school set
the direction of the rest of my life. I
was recruited to be on the track team and run cross-country at Bethany College
in Lindsborg, Kansas.
I visited the campus with my mom, signed my letter of intent, and put
down my enrollment fee all in one visit, over my spring break. In the fall of 2006, I moved to college and
began the next phase of my athletic career.
While there are many fond, specific
memories I have of each sport I have participated in over the years, I believe
those are for another time. For now, I
leave you with the thought that something can indeed come from nothing. For me, discovering my athletic abilities
helped me piece together my future, and continues to inspire me to this
day.
More to come on my collegiate
career.
