@wittmann:
You played football? I am surprised. Happy, but surprised.
I have never been good at sports. Hated PE at school.
Spent my last years at school dreaming about AD&D and planning castle building.
I played from 3rd Grade through 8th Grade. which is junior high, and on my senior year in high school, I played in a city league.
The first team I was on was called the Blue Angels. We were horrible and didn’t know anything about football, but quickly learned. Of course, here in the States, we called it soccer.
This was only one of two losing seasons I was to have.
The next season, I joined a team called the Blazers. Our first two seasons we got second place in our city league.
The next 4 seasons, were remarkable.
We won 4 championships in a row.
For the first seven seasons I played a defense. We were feared for our tenacity at defense, especially the four years we won, but as a defensemen, we never got the praise the forwards got, but without a defense we couldn’t of won that many championships in row.
I got tired of not getting any respect, so I changed teams.
You know as a kid, you always want to be a goal scorer, but I didn’t get that opportunity till my 8th season, then I joined a new called the Stompers.
I finally got my break as a forward. I played on both winged positions on either side. I was called the, “setup man,” and was very good at it. I would set people up to score, but because I was a forward, I finally was in position to scores, as well, for the team.
I played for 4 seasons with this team, and we went to the championship every year against the same team and they beat us three times in a row, until the fourth year and we finally beat them.
I was finishing 8th grade when I won my fifth championship and was not eligible to play again. This was 1984.
I was so sad because football(soccer) wasn’t available in high school, in Paris, at the time. Only the big cities, in Texas, had high school soccer, at the time, then something special happened my senior year.
A city league opened up in Paris, Texas for high schoolers. I was barely eligible to play, because 18 years old was the maximum age, you could play.
We were used as test subjects for possible high school soccer teams. We had to play well enough against big city teams, like Dallas and Houston, Texas, in order to be granted a high school soccer program.
That last year I played, our record was 5-6-1, not quite at .500 wins, but we managed to defeat some Dallas teams, enough to earn a soccer program for Paris High School and to this day, because of how well we played, they have a soccer program, still to this day. A few years after that, my high school, North Lamar, got a program a well.
Even though, I never got to play soccer in high school, my team was instrumental, in 1988, for getting my town soccer programs that have survived even till this day.
That is something, I’m real proud of. :-D
