we goin to the play-offs…

            If you don’t want to read a personal manifesto on my feelings about being a winner, then skip the next 7 paragraphs to get right to hearing about us going to the play-offs. If you want to hear somebody speak jibberish about their own ego for a little bit and see if you correspond, then continue on in the regular English language reading manner of top to bottom.

You always think you are going to have success coming into something. You believe that you have the special talents and the different perspective and the enthusiasm to make whatever situation you enter into a magical one. Doesn’t always seem to work our that way though. Still, I have always felt like a winner. That is not to say I have always won, or been completely confident in myself, or always felt important or valuable, or even like I was any good to anyone around me. Often enough I feel like I am in a constant state of screwing up. But that being what it may be, I have always felt like a winner.

            I don’t know if its about my competitiveness. I mean I am really really really competitive, almost to a fault at times. But everyone likes to win, especially athletes, and nobody likes to lose.

I don’t know if it’s the athletes around me. As long as I have played sports I have been around great athletes. I feel like I am constantly around people who have gone on to achieve great accomplishments, whether that be in track, football, soccer, lacrosse, even wrestling. Maybe the group mentality I have been fostered in makes me feel this way.

            I could maybe simply be fortunate. I might have just stumbled into good situations, or bad situations that have a lot of potential to become good, or gotten out of bad situations when they weren’t going anywhere. Lucky stars and all that. Still, you never want to believe it is just being fortunate. I mean, you always want to believe that you have the universe helping you out and that you are fortunate, but if you rely on that too much then it takes away your initiative.

            I have always worked pretty hard. I have always pursued success. Not always to the best of my abilities, and not always with a single-mindedness that many people can achieve, but in most things I have really wanted I have tried to become better. I have worked harder at this game of Lacrosse then almost anything else in my life. In that same vein, it has frustrated me almost as much as anything ever has. We have a love/hate relationship, this game and I. Still, some people around me don’t seem to work hard at all and seem to achieve more than me, while others work just as much or more and I see them continually frustrated. Hard work is a fickle reliance.

            So quite honestly, I don’t know why I have always felt like a winner. I have a trophy case, but it has plenty of bronze medals on it. I have report cards from my past that say “needs improvement” and “doesn’t complete work satisfactorily.” Shoot, I was on the first lacrosse team in 3 years at RHS not to go to the state championship game, then we lost in the semi’s when I was a senior. Our football team had a losing record when I was a sophomore and junior. This team I am on now has never even made the play-offs while I was here, even though before I came they went like 11 straight years. Loyola had the best winning percentage of any D1 lacrosse team in the 90’s for Christ sake. As far as the alumni were concerned, we were failures.

            Still, I always thought of myself as a winner. There were times when I of course felt like a failure. A lot of times actually. But being a winner was just something I knew was part of me, even in those times. It was like my youth. My youth is always there, and is always going to have been there. Even when I feel old, or forget what being a kid was like, my youth is always there, triggered by smells and dreams and beers with my friends. Feeling like a winner just falls into that category of things that are a part of my psyche. I see this attribute in every single person I know as well. It is just that in some of us, we get so addicted to the feeling that we start to get a little kooky when it doesn’t manifest itself.

            So we are in the play-offs. Wow. Dream come true, foreal. The day they announced the seedings for the play-offs was the longest day of my life. It was last Sunday, the day after we lost to Hopkins (bullshit by the way, they caught a lucky break because we turned it over. We will see them again). The selection show was on at 9 that night, and we had some doubts about if we were going to make it. Before the Hopkins game we were sure we were going to, but you never know with these conference tournaments and automatic qualifiers. Anyways, I was a wreck all day. I was running around my house yelling at my roommates, calling people, trying to figure out if we thought we made it, what the chances were, who would get in in front of us, what we could do, who would know, etc… It was terrible. I was so stressed out because there was nothing I could do. It was out of my hands. I thought about every game and what we could have done to further solidify our spot. The day was literally counted in minutes for me. It was literally a task to find whatever I could do to pass the time. I had tests and papers due that I could not even think of worrying about because trying to sit in one spot and concentrate was simply out of the question.

            The room, full of 50 normally very loud and boisterous guys, was completely silent that night at 9. The only noise for the first 5 minutes was a unified in-take of break in surprise when they named Duke the number 1 seed over undefeated Cornell. They announced the first 4 seeds. The entire room was full of shaking knees and churning stomachs. The showed the next match-up. I will remember what it looked like on that bracket on that TV screen forever…

 

Loyola (Md.)

                        Vs.

#5 Albany

 

I did the flying fist spinning uppercut Ryu/Ken “arruicken” as soon as I saw it. The entire fucking room exploded.  Hugs and high fives and smiles galore. I mean it was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I have had a lot of those this semester.

 

I literally still get butterflies in my stomach when I think about the joy of that moment. It was the culmination of to many things to recount here, but which I am sure I have already expressed. Imagine a school-wide dodge ball tournament when you were in elementary school and finding out you were the first pick of everyone. Or getting picked for the lead in the play.  Or finding out that “she” actually secretly liked you the whole time too. Now multiply that times a 4 year build up, add gallons of sweat, tears, blood, and soul, throw a little exponent on the end of how much you have dreamt about, discussed, thought about, and desired this opportunity, and then put it in a matrices because we still don’t know how its going to turn out but dag-na-bit we know for damn sure that we are IN. Then you might be able to understand this joy.

 

All that just so that I could go to practice again on Monday. “Practice. We talking about Practice. Not a game. Practice.” So that for once in my career I could know what it was like to go out on that turf when it was really, really hot and humid. So that for once everyone else could have gone home for the summer but for us to still be here. Just us, a team who just wants to keep playing together. I am grateful.

 

Albany is a heck of a team. The play Canadian style in a way, which means very one-handed and very slick skills. They are 14-2 this year, and beat Hopkins early on. They are well coached, one of their coaches being an assistant on the US national team I believe. They have the leading points scorer in the country (yes, more goals and assists that Danowski even). They have between 2 attackemen almost 300 shots. That’s like 25 a game between two players. One kid has 139 shots this year. That is probably more than I have had in 4 years playing here, and I have started for 2 of those years. They love to shoot. They are good shooters. They are great finishers.

            They are like no team I have ever played against in college really. They share the ball unbelievably well. I have seen few times where a team could feed the crease, then make ANOTHER pass to a different guy who is also in the crease, and then score. They have athletic middies, but they don’t play like typical college middies. The dodge more from the corners than from up top, and the look to get under the defense, or feed it inside. There defense will often just shut one guy on the other team, the person they think will most disrupt the offensive flow of a team, and then make you play 5 on 5. They are extremely dangerous in transition and in broken situations. They throw a lot of different looks at you on defense, so it is hard to predict what they are going to try to do or get into a rhythm.

            But they haven’t played a team like us. A team defense like ours is going to mess them up. The way we guard their on-ball players is going to take away their inside guys ability to get open. If we don’t slide, and sort of “look away” from the guy with the ball and instead just watch our man, then we could have success. We are prepared offensively if they shut any of our players, and also are really going to look to take care of the ball. Our best defense is us having the ball.

            Most of all, we are going to hustle like we never have before. We are going to try and own the ground ball war. We are going to swarm. We are going to be very very physical with them. We are going to run by them. Hopefully, we can play our very best thus far, and we are going to beat them.

 

            My coach said that this week we have to call someone and tell them “I love you, we have a game on Sunday against Albany, and we are going to win.” He wants us to get it into our heads how glad we are to be here, and remember who made it possible for us to be in this position. He also wants us to believe in ourselves, that we are going to play great in this game, and we are going to win. I guess that is what feeling like a winner is about. Having people around me who have always told me “I could” and that “I will,” and me trying my best to fulfill those expectations. I have been blessed with chances to win many times, and some of those times it has come to fruition. I loved knowing I succeeded, and feeling like I was the best. Those things are great. They have a downside too though. What has really stayed in this heart of mine though is the realization that the people who always make me feel like a winner are the people I love most. I remember climbing off the mat after winning the National Championship in the High Jump when I was 14 (not the pole vault, the high jump for the none track folk). The bar had literally bounced off the pegs a good 2 inches in the air and landed back in place. I just sat and watched it wobble. It stabilized, and as I climbed off the mat slowly, contemplating the reality of what had just happened, I turned and looked at the fence behind the pit. There was my mother and father, out it Omaha, Nebraska, in the middle of the summer, for the sole reason to watch me climb off that mat with a smile. I guarantee my mom was talking to the person next to her when it happened, but all she ever cared about was that it made me happy to succeed anyways. I love them for that. From my brother and sister, to my family, my friends, coaches, younger players…Everyone who makes me smile the deep smile, let me say this. I love you, and we are going to win Sunday.

 

 I feel like a winner because I am a winner. I have won the opportunity to be loved, and that is from God, and has nothing to do with my trophy shelf.

 

That being said, it would still be amazing to keep winning in this season though. One more really big trophy couldn’t hurt.

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