No More Thanksgivings

It was 2012 in a tiny, rural county on the western border of South Carolina called McCormick. I was brought in that year for a multitude of reasons, but for the sake of this story, I was there because McCormick’s high school football team needed an offensive playcaller, and I was looking to enhance my resume with some coordinating experience, so it was a nice, symbiotic pairing that year. And while I would like to think that it was singularly me who came in and changed the program around, the truth is that I found myself in a wonderfully fortuitous situation. The head coach was in his second year, a defensive guy who needed someone to take the weight of offense off of him. Despite winning only three games the year before, he had laid a pretty solid foundation that year for what was to be a huge step forward in the program in the future. And, most importantly, we had the horses.

An early lesson I learned from a reputable coaching mentor was that, despite how much we thought that the coaches made the greatest difference in high school football, the unavoidable reality was that the team that had the best athletes had the best chance of winning. That seems like a no-brainer, but your pride really starts messing with you as a coach, filling your head with thoughts that your system is perfect and you can win with any players. But that’s nonsense. You take the greatest racehorse owner with the greatest jockeys in the world, and you know what their number one key to success is? The horses.

At McCormick in 2012, we had the horses. We only had 28 kids on the varsity roster, but 24 of them were seniors. Seniors who had played football, together, as a team, for the past 7-8 years. I could have called any play (and I often did, as it was my first experience as a playcaller) and it would have been successful. In the end, it was no surprise to anyone that we went 8-2 and won the region. It surprised nobody that we skated through the playoffs with ease, winning three consecutive home games leading to our first state championship appearance in decades. The only surprise came from the turnaround, from three wins the year before to over 11 this year. Our head coach was not surprised; he had a pretty astounding resume and a history of success, so he knew the direction the program was heading. One day, at the end of a practice late in the season, he said something to me that stuck. The context for the statement was how well the kids have learned the system, how great they’ve adapted to our changes, and just how immensely talented they were when they worked as a team.

He simply smiled, took a deep breath, and said, “Well… no more Thanksgivings.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. My initial emotion was one of sadness; you see, I’m a large man. I’m the kind of man that appreciates a grand-scale turkey dinner. Mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, a smorgasbord of starches, and enough meat to fill a grizzly bear for winter. My mother-in-law spoils me with a baked turkey, a fried turkey, and a honey-glazed ham every Turkey Day. And so hearing these words… well, I wasn’t ready to hear those words. But after some serious consideration, I started to understand.

In the high school football world, Thanksgiving always lands at or around State Championship time. Sometimes they share the same weekend, sometimes it’s the week of the semi-finals. Whatever; you get the point. In my previous four years as a football coach, I cut my teeth with a team that was perennially terrible. In my best season with them, they made playoffs and were obliterated in the first round by a team that had no problem relaying the message that we didn’t belong. So every year, we had taken up pads and were ready and waiting for the buffet line that is Thanksgiving to appear.

But this year, 2012 in McCormick, Thanksgiving morning was spent on a bus, driving to a local college so that we could do walkthroughs on a turfed field, something that zero percent of our kids had ever done and would be expected to do the very next day at the championship game. The wife had driven to her mother’s four hours away. I was to go to practice, return to the school, and return home all by my lonesome. No turkey. No casserole. No Black Friday shopping. Just me, something microwavable, and the always entertaining Detroit Lions. And sadness.

But that’s the sacrifice. We’d put in an entire offseason of workouts, a whole preseason camp, all of fall, everything to reach this point. The community was hyped; they’d bought-in. It was amazing. But the cost of success is a high one. You don’t always realize the sacrifices, big or small, that need to be made in order to achieve what you desire. We finally reached the mountaintop, and something has to go. For me, that thing was Thanksgiving.

A few years later, my wife and I started talking. Talking turned to planning. Planning turned to saving. Other unmentionable steps followed, but the end result was the same: we had been married for quite some time, she got sick of looking at me, and the decision was made to start building our family. We’re planners and savers, so a lot of serious contemplation went down before we started seriously trying for kids, but the cliché is true: there is no perfect time. We just reached that moment where we wanted children more than anything else. And that sounds all fine and dandy.

But… they don’t tell you what you’re giving up for this. I’m a coach, a coach of multiple sports, so I’m not home much. I’m a gamer, of the video and board variety, so when I am home, I’m deeply invested in something that is both exhilarating and, let’s be honest, trivial. I have friends that I like going out with, I still had this delusion that I was still youthful and energetic and invested in my hobbies and friends and… Stop. Pause.

God just gave us twins.

Luke and Logan were born on March 31, 2016: an amazing, and amazingly stressful day. Now, my kids are amazing. They’re fun, and funny. They’re smart like their mother. They’re immature, like me. They’re the best possible outcome of what was an unbelievably eventful and, let’s be honest, stressful period of time in my life. And while they were an absolute answer to prayers, that first year was… it was something. Sitcoms do it justice pretty well: poop, two-in-the-morning feedings, pee pee diapers, random fluid eruptions, four-in-the-morning feedings, more poop. Now multiply that times two. Oh, and make the mother super ambitious with a strong desire to nurse both of them. Simultaneously. Add in the normal stuff you get from premature babies, sprinkle in some random developmental breathing issues, and you’ve got a decent idea of how those first 9-12 months went for us. Our nearest family was four and half hours away, and while the mother-in-law was a saint at the time, it was still a TIME (mind you: don’t feel too bad for me. Once they get past that one year point, twins are a BREEZE; they’re like built-in best friends. I just say “Go play blocks with your brother,” and they’re off. Dad of the year, folks!).

When we were childless, my wife was a coach in the stands. She made it to all of my games. But when we were in the baby planning stages, she looked at me, very solemnly, and declared right to my soul: “You can coach as many sports as you want right now; that’s fine. But when we start bringing babies into this world: you get one. You pick one. That’s it. Wrestling or football: that’s your choice. You get one. You’re home with me the rest of the offseason.” And she meant it. Obviously, football won, but it’s closer than you think. Wrestling was near and dear to me. And track… well, I enjoyed the irony of eating a double quarter pounder with cheese while screaming at the sprinters to “Run faster!” with burger grease running from one chin to the next.

And video games… those poor, sweet video games. After the birth of my children, my lonely X-Box remained untouched, covered in a thick layer of dust for over nine months. Even then, despite my strict Christian standards and a desire to be a better man each and every day, I enjoy the occasional thefting of automobiles and random acts of bloody violence and swear words in my gaming life, and all that went out the window. I tried explaining to my wife that it didn’t matter to my enthralled two-year-old watching me 360-no-scope some poor eleven-year-old east-Asian kid’s head clean off his shoulders.

“He’s two,” I claimed, “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing.” Luke’s eyes glistened and his smile beamed as the reflection of the geyser of blood pouring from the virtual soldier’s avatar appealed to him in some primal way his toddler mind couldn’t understand.

“That man’s entire head exploded,” she responded. Believe it or not, I lost that argument.

So, goodbye to wrestling. Goodbye to track. Goodbye to “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty”. Goodbye to random coach weekends and staff bonding exercises involving hotel rooms and bars. Goodbye to any friends I had that didn’t have kids already (now adult friendships are exclusively excuses to have one set of kids watch another set of kids while the adults gossip and, to the chagrin of my best friend Ed, eat all their food and sleep on their couch).

But the end result? I have two amazing little boys now. They’re smart. Healthy. Funny. Helpful. And their ceiling is sky high. Are the sacrifices I’ve made worth it? Absolutely. I’d do it again. I’d re-up every year if I had to.

But that is a hard lesson to teach teenagers. Athletes: sacrifices have to be made for success to even be a possibility. For my McCormick Chiefs, it was the sweating. The bleeding. The sore muscles. The time away from their families and friends. The late nights staying awake trying to cram studying in so they could balance respectable grades with 2-3 hour daily practices. The going to your summer job every day with wobbly legs because today was leg day and Coach Buffkin doesn’t care if you have to go to your landscaping job after workouts. That’s the rub, bud.

And the worst case scenario? Even with all the workouts, there’s still no guarantee. We made it to State that year, but we didn’t win it. Cross High School took a twelve point lead into halftime and kept it through a big scoring battle in the second half. Did they make sacrifices? They most certainly did. Did they sacrifice more than we did? Not a chance. But if there’s a winner, there must also be a runner-up, and in 2012, that was us. No guarantees. The same is true for raising kids. I can do everything right, make all the appropriate sacrifices, and I can still end up raising a monster. Or two, God help me.

So what do you do? Make the sacrifice for what you love the most. Like most young men, I loved the ladies growing up. I would make countless terrible decisions because of the opposite sex. But as much as I loved the ladies (insert winking face emoji), turns out I love my wife a lot more. I put those other ladies behind me for the sake of the one woman who made me happy, who made me a better man. So what do I love more: Luke and Logan or my video games? Or bars? Or going on coaching weekends?

It’s not even close. I love my boys more than I love my next breath of air.

So it’s a willing sacrifice. I love the Lord my God, so a ten percent tithe is nothing in the grand scheme of things. I love my house, so a little bit of sweat trying to get the weeds out of the rose garden won’t kill me. For my athletes: what do you love? It’s a cliché at this point, but the three most common killers of high school players’ athletic dreams are the THREE G’s: Girls, Gas, and… a third G that I’d rather not specify in an effort to keep this family-friendly. If you love those things, then that is your God-given American right (insert flag emoji here). But do you love the game?

Prove it. You have the rest of your life for Thanksgivings.