The Scenic Route

Most normal twenty-four year old people from my hometown could say what they were going to do with rest of their lives by the time they were seventeen. I am not one of those people. My life has wandered down different paths that seemingly led to nowhere special.

Sometime mid-March 2005, I made a fateful decision to plunge myself into a life of hazard signs and warning labels. By making that fateful decision to join the US Army. The notion had been creeping into my mind for a while. I had wasted another semester of community college. My life was not  heading down a road I had wanted it to go down. So I made the call.

Before I left for basic training, I wanted to coach football on some level. I knew one person that was involved in coaching, my buddy Kevin. His son Keegan was nine, and the phrase involved in sports didn’t do Keegan justice. Keegan’s team was a recreational league team. I know that rec league isn’t the biggest stage, but I thought coaching would be fun.  So, a conversation with Kevin led to me running his son’s team’s defense.

The 2005 Douglas All-Stars. Many of these young men are still  performing in the Coffee High Trojan Athletic Program.

If I had known how much I was going to enjoy coaching defense on the football field I would have had a more defined direction at this point. Teaching the fundamentals of a great defense was my thing. The act of teaching those young men a game and then seeing them go out and put what they had learned into action were some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had, Kevin asked, “You ever thought about coaching?” I remember responding, “That means I would have to teach, and do you know what that means?” It meant becoming a full-time teacher and that meant more school.

 Let's Fast-forward three years after I joined the Army

I met a girl from Texas while in Arizona, we will call her Sarah. She was working on her Master's in teaching. Sarah helped me decide to be a teacher. She brought up the fact that I enjoyed watching children use what they had learned. I remember having this "eureka" moment and realizing what I was supposed to become.

A letter I received after making the Dean's List while attending S. Georgia College

Long after my relationship with “Sarah” was over my purpose remained in a burning state. I was discharged from active duty on Dec 29^th, 2009, and was sitting a classroom Jan 7^th, 2010. Nothing could stand in my way. Realizing for the first time how important things like: going to class, taking good notes, and studying for test, my GPA rose heads and shoulders above where it had been during my first stint in college. I even made the Dean’s List after my first semester.

Now, it’s 2013, and I’m enrolled at Armstrong, which isn’t by any means the University of Georgia, but for a man who didn’t have a direction seven years before, is not bad. Once I found what I was meant to be, I decided nothing will stop me from achieving my goal. If a door is closed,  a window appears to throw a brick through.