Play hard while you still can. When lacrosse is gone from your life, you WILL miss it!
The familiarity of reaching behind your bedroom door and feeling the fabric of your favorite hoodie. What luck. Rips. Tears. Stains. Only your fingers know that fabric in such a way, just as that only that hoodie knows of you, and the trials and tribulations you have put your body through. The extra tenth of a mile you demanded your concrete legs run, not walk. That beautiful rich smell of melting snow into the hidden earth once again exposed… this hoodie remembers spring. Now, so do you.
The air is different now. You’re different. Lazy Sundays and lethargic afternoons accounted for most of your winter days. Those days are gone. It’s March. It’s time for lacrosse.
I love it. It’s a feeling that I’ve always loved and I didn’t really realize how much I loved it until I had a Spring without a season to look forward to. That didn’t feel so good. But, I digress. This isn’t about me or my Spring. This one is for the guys and girls who are fortunate enough to still have at least one more Spring in front of them.
Play Hard This Spring, While You Still Can!
You lucky dogs, you. I want you to take a minute and honestly look at your life and realize what a gift you have. Was there food on the table tonight? Do you know that there will be a next meal? Roof over your head? A healthy body? A (relatively) happy and safe home? You’re lucky. As was I.
And now you’re going to have the opportunity to have a season playing the game you love. Shouldn’t you put the phone down right about now and go run a mile just out of sheer gratitude for your life and the great things you’re going to do with it? Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Whether you’re going out for your first season of modified, or you’re a couple games in to your last college season, this is just a humble request for you to bust your hump for the guys around you. By no means was I ever a standout in any of my playing days, but the greatest memories I have are of a battered and beaten body that is so oxygen deprived it doesn’t even have the energy to puke. Muscles so tired I couldn’t lift my face to smile with my parents for a photograph. I remember that unspoken conversation with the guy lying in the mud next to me after an ungodly amount of conditioning.
And the reverse is just as vivid. It’s pretty haunting, actually. I remember days I didn’t care. Days I wanted to quit and my negativity physically manifested into lazy feet and an even lazier attitude. I can remember every single time I was selfish and immature. I quit on myself. I can never go back and tell myself to suck it up and go hard. In practices, in games. Priorities so backward I really don’t know who the hell I was. If I spent a tenth of the time I was either drinking, drunk or hung over in college on hitting the weight room, the wall, or the pavement… it will forever haunt me the player I could’ve been.
Your time is precious, and your time is beautiful, because it is your time, and nobody else can have it.
What you decide to do with your time is up to you. You can throw 100% of yourself into it, and be proud of the outcome no matter the scoreboard, or you can put in less, and rationalize with your future self later on down the road.
This isn’t to guilt you into running another quick mile (go on… I’ll wait again…), nor is it to demand you put 4 hours a day into preparation for the coming season. It’s just a friendly request from the ghosts of 100,000 careers come and gone, that you leave absolutely no doubt in your mind at the end of the day when you ask your body, “could we have tried harder?”
It’s March. Get out there and show the world what you’ve got.
