Service

At some point between trying on cleats for the first time and preparing for a final season as a senior, every athlete realizes just how much they used to love the sport. They remember a time when it wasn’t about performance or comparison, when the game felt like community and joy rather than pressure and division. Most players know they aren’t going to continue into college athletics.  Many have only played for a few seasons.  Some grew up with the sport as a constant part of their identity.  However, the handful who truly fell in love with the game, who sacrificed years of childhood for it, recognize a shift near the end. 

They remember how simple it used to be: the plays, the practices, the games. It was about having a good time. It was fun. Somewhere along the way, it changed. A parent yelled at a ref. A coach snapped at a kid. Someone got benched because they weren’t “playing well enough.” A team was banned for cheating. Parents called out children from the sidelines. Slowly, the idea of fun was replaced with the idea of winning. Parents began living through their kids, and kids learned that playing wasn’t enough. Winning was required.  Winning was fun.  Winners had fun. And if you weren’t winning, you weren’t enough. 

This cycle forces athletes into a harsh realization: they either begin to hate themselves or the sport. Life becomes a competition where anything less than number one feels like failure. Athletes compare themselves constantly, measuring their worth against teammates and opponents. This brings forth incredible feats of strength, but it also teaches kids to see themselves as a collection of flaws waiting to be corrected. This cycle raises a generation of spectacular athletes who feel insecure, unwanted, and eventually left behind. This cycle has made the world's most beautiful freakshows.

Going into my senior year, I’ve felt this firsthand.  I’ve felt the weight of realizing how short life is, how quickly people move on to the next best thing and how nothing ever feels like enough. Fulfillment becomes a finish line that keeps shifting. As you get older, the people who once supported you through the struggles step back, knowing you’ve learned to carry them yourself even when you wish you could let them go. Growing up brings new priorities, new freedoms, and new distractions. Filling your life with people and choices that you want feels amazing, but it also forces reality checks. You realize you might not be cut out for the next level. You realize you won’t have time to manage a sport. Or worse, you realize how much easier life feels without the commitment. So, you quit.

Recently, while coaching at Holy Family’s youth camp, I saw the same cycle already forming and these kids don’t even know it’s happening. Every single one of them is becoming part of the next generation of athletes, and they’re already slipping into the patterns we fell into. Most of them are average, some mess around and get punished with push‑ups, and some take everything as seriously as possible. There’s always the loud kid, the quiet one who doesn’t talk to anyone but is the best out of all of them, the kid who cares about every detail and the kid who doesn’t care at all. Even at nine or ten years old, you can see the early signs of pressure, comparison, and expectation creeping in.

But there are always two or three kids who stand out. Not because they’re the best, but because they’re having fun. They remind me why I started playing. They remind me of who I used to be; a kid who loved the game for what it was, not for what it demanded. As a linebacker, I worked with kids who thought they might be one someday. I ran them through the same drills, the same footwork, the same mental training I do myself. And watching them, I realized something important.

The kids who were having fun didn’t care whether they won or lost. They cared about going full speed. They cared about being with their friends. They cared about enjoying the moment. They cared about the game itself, not the outcome. And in them, I saw the version of the sport that we all started with, the version we spend years trying to get back to.

Coaching these kids, not just watching them, brings a sense of nostalgia and optimism. When they outrun someone for the first time, they look around to see if you noticed. When they make a mistake, they will try again but it doesn't bother them as much, the whole experience is wholesome. Their smallest victories felt greater than my best ones. Teaching kids about the sport I genuinely love helps me feel more connected to the game and myself.  It reminds me of the reasons I love it but also the importance of influencing the next generation of players to be better.

In those moments of authentic fun, you realize the game was never not beautiful, we just closed our eyes. Coaching at camps reminds you of when the game was absent from fear. It reminds you it’s supposed to make you feel alive and aware, not afraid and alone. And finally, it reminds you of just how much more you will see, when you have clear eyes and a full heart.

What an absolute privilege and advantage it is to be born into a Catholic Christian, family raised through Sunday school and youth groups, and taught the proper values of the one true God. Recently, I attended the Steubenville Conference of the Rockies. I saw and met Father Mike Schmitz, while hearing about the values of my faith and the goals we must uphold for the future. This was my second Steubenville Conference, and I see things much more clearly the second time around than I did during the first. Rather than walking away feeling like I was able to let go of some of the negative emotions and feelings I carry handcuffed around myself, I walked away realizing just how different each person’s world is.

What I began to understand is that being raised in a faith‑filled home is not just a blessing, it is a head start, a foundation, a safety net that many people never receive. When you grow up surrounded by scripture, community, and the constant reminder that your life has purpose, you don’t realize how much of the world grows up without any of this. You don’t realize how many people are raised in spiritual silence, or worse, spiritual hostility. You don’t realize how many kids never hear that they are loved by God, or that their life has meaning beyond survival. And when you finally meet people who grew up in those conditions, you begin to understand the weight of your own privilege in a way that is almost uncomfortable.

At Steubenville, surrounded by thousands of teens united in faith, I started to see the cracks, not in the Church, but in the lives of the persons attending. Some were there because they wanted to be. Some were there because their parents forced them to be. Some were searching desperately for something to hold onto. Some were just trying to escape the chaos of their home life for a weekend. And some were simply lost, hoping that maybe God would speak louder in a conference hall than He does in their everyday life. That realization alone made the whole experience feel depressing but also uplifting.

My whole life I have seen both sides of things, I have been friends with future criminals, and ace degenerates. I’ve also been friends with uptight, never-do-anything-wrong kinds of people. I’ve had friends who love studying and school so much they just can’t seem to get enough of it. And I’ve had friends who I genuinely wonder about their ability to read from time to time. I’ve had friends who are afraid of their own shadow, and friends who walk around looking for a reason to start trouble with some unsuspecting bystander. I’ve had friends who place their love and faith in their families and others who place it in a 30 dollar geek bar. The point is I’ve had a very diverse life. I’ve met a lot of interesting people and gotten a lot of perspectives on their lives.

Seeing all these different people, all these different worlds, made me realize that no two lives are shaped the same way. Some people grow up with structure, others with chaos. Some grow up with unconditional love, others with conditional survival. Some grow up with the moral compass of the Church guiding them, others grow up with no such help at all. Yet, we all end up in the same spaces.  The same schools, the same retreats, the same pews, trying to make sense of our lives with wildly different starting points. That diversity of experience is what makes humanity beautiful, but it’s also what makes it tragic. When you’ve seen both sides, the kids who had everything and the kids who had nothing, you can’t help but feel the imbalance. You can’t help but feel the injustice of it. You can’t help but wonder why some children are handed faith like a gift, while others must claw their way toward it through trauma, fear and neglect.

On one side, you have a boy raised Catholic, learning lessons from watching the VeggieTales cartoons and attending Sunday school. A boy who was taught right from wrong from the moment he was able to understand, and one who was raised with the express purpose of revolving his whole life around God. Conversely, on the other side, you have a boy raised in a home filled with violence and abuse, where he felt as if a prayer was like firing a blank, and his only thought was getting through the day, one moment at a time. Is this fair? 

This is the question that haunts anyone who has seen the contrast up close. How can two children, both made in the image of God, live in such different worlds? How can one child grow up believing God is a loving Father, while another grows up believing God is silent, distant, or nonexistent? How can one child be taught virtue from birth, while another is taught struggle before they even learn to speak? It feels unfair because it is unfair. Not in the sense that God is unjust, but in the sense that humanity is broken. We inherit the wounds of those who came before us, their mistakes, their sins, their failures to love. And children, the most innocent among us, often carry the heaviest weight of that inheritance. They grow up paying the emotional, spiritual, and psychological debts of adults who never paid their own.

This cycle, this generational passing down of sins, is one of the greatest tragedies of our society. It creates a world where some children sprint towards God while others crawl, bleeding and hoping He might notice them. It creates a world where faith feels natural to some and impossible to others. It creates a world where the starting line is not the same for everyone, even though the finish line is. The cycle of kids paying for the sins of others has consumed our society and deprived us and it is not fair. 

While it would be easy to point out the obvious differences between America and Peru—such as the landscape, weather, language, or location—I’d rather talk about the underlying layer that was the real intent behind the trip. During my time there, I found myself making friends with people from my school whom I had never interacted with before. I found myself watching the city as this foreign experience while it was someone else’s everyday routine. And most importantly, I found myself getting used to the extreme discomfort of a lower standard of living.

Spending what felt like a short lifetime in a place millions call home, after having only lived in America my whole life, was as eye‑opening as it gets. At the start, all I could think about were the bugs, the heat, the constant sense of unfamiliarity. However, as the trip went on—especially during the service hours—my priorities shifted. Rather than worrying about the spiders, the cuts, and the weight of the humid environment, I found myself worrying about accomplishing my goal. I will never forget some of the looks I saw on the schoolgirls’ faces I was there to serve. My privilege felt like it had been left on the plane, and my pride was cut by the sickle in my own hand as I worked on my hands and knees for hours for the sole purpose of making a few dozen people’s lives just a little bit better.

Closer to the end of the trip, I grew comfortable—strange burdens becoming an everyday norm that would be shockingly ripped away as quickly as they were given in the span of one flight. These experiences led me to the conclusion that there was no real difference between Peru and America beyond what you can see. The people are believers who have dreams and goals just like Americans, not separated by talent but by opportunity. While I may be worried about my essay score, they might be worried about having enough money to keep their kids in school.

I learned how to adapt to an uncomfortable environment in a way that allowed me to sacrifice my own time, body, and mind for a child who doesn’t speak my language and has never—and likely will never—see me again. People born into the privilege of being American aren’t better or different than those born in nations such as Peru. We are not better because we were born on third base and act as if we hit a triple. Instead, we are made better by understanding that if we have the ability to help, then we have the responsibility to do so—and no amount of capital or background will ever separate human nature at its purest roots.