How I became a writer Part XIV

Title: How I became a writer

Part XIV

BBC (Baptist Bible College now Clark Summit University) was the doom of my soccer season when I played for Practical Bible College.  My brother Richard went to BBC and tried to join their soccer team.  That summer they sent him expectations and I picked it up off the table glancing at it... wow was it intimidating!  They had to be able to juggle the soccer ball with each limb area consecutively at least 50 times.  So, if I understood the “welcome to the team” paper, you had to be able to isolate each part of your body with perfect control.  (Or it meant that they had to juggle over 200 times touching each of those areas at least 50 times..the paper was kind of confusing.)  That was WAY beyond my skill level!  The most I’ve ever juggled the soccer ball was in the thirties and it required whatever body part was handy to keep things going.  They had multiple “All-American” players and seemed to make a habit of going to Nationals every year.  Our team requirements?  If you were breathing, you could be on the team!

My sophomore year, I was playing defense against BBC and the ball was in the 18 yard box.  The problem was a BBC player was in-between me and the ball.  Technically, I’m allowed to run through that player to get to the ball BUT this is the BOX and if the official decides I fouled the individual, the consequences are severe!  I smashed through the player (who I’m sure wasn’t expecting that!  The poor guy was probably was thinking about getting another goal against our team.)  I expected the dread sound of the whistle and a yellow card but there was no whistle.  I said in a recent blog that I learned that just kicking the ball away was a bad idea, so did I “carry” it up the field?  Are you kidding!  With a swarm of All-Americans crashing the goal area???  No, I did what I did best:)  I put the ball in another zip code as fast as I could!  Did I save the game?  No.  We still lost badly:)

A different year I was coaching Practical’s soccer team against BBC.  Wait?  I was a college coach????  Don’t be too impressed.  I wasn’t paid and they didn’t recruit.  We didn’t even have a soccer camp that year.  My team was so green some of them didn’t even know how to kick off a ball at the beginning of a game.  I am not kidding.  It was surreal to run out to my strikers and explain how to kick off a ball before a college game.  We had given mercy from Philadelphia College of the Bible (when their coach realized how weak we were, he ordered his players to only score by heading the ball.  It made it fun for both of us:) but BBC was not known for their mercy.  (My senior year, when I went back for my Bachelors degree, they beat us 19 or 20 to nothing and my team was much stronger that year!)  As a coach I was scared for my brave but very green soccer team.  I could only think of one solution to hold down the score and it was sinful.  I’m serious, it was clear cut sin, that was not a joke reference.  Do you know, no matter how moral you are in your life, those times you gave into your base character will haunt you the rest of your life.  Anyway, I felt BBC had a fair amount of pride and I noticed they were struggling to find their groove against us.  It’s one of those things you’ve seen in professional sports dozens of times.  A really strong team struggles against the worst team in the league.  I didn’t say the weak team often wins but sometimes it seems like the stronger team plays at a much lower level.  That is what happened here and I realized I could use this to my advantage to help my team.  I’m an actor and I pretended to talk to the players on the bench (very few) while I was really talking to the BBC players on the field.  One of their players shoveled the ball over the goal and I was like, “Wow, I would have expected better from BBC.  That was really bad.”  You think that’s not very harsh?  You didn’t hear the way I said it.  The amount of scorn in my voice, you’d think they were the weak team.  I kept subtly mocking them, cloaked in commentary for my bench.  I figured a team like that struggled with pride and I exploited it.  It worked.  They only beat us 11-0.  (You have to understand, the best we had ever done against BBC in my career was 8-0).  I congratulated my guys as if they had won the Super Bowl...but what I had done was evil.  If you are one of those BBC players, I want to take this moment to apologize to you sincerely.  Even if the score had reached 25 or 30 to nothing, I wish I had been like Christ.  I also don’t want you (the reader) to think the guys on my team were hopeless.  Many of them were very athletic and some were good soccer players.  One example was Jonathan Myers, who was a Lacrosse player but had never played soccer.  He picked it up quick and did well for us:)

My senior year we were driving to the game against BBC without our goalie.  Yeah, what a great start!  The coach yelled back, “I’ve heard other teams from Practical have gotten beaten horribly by this team.  That is not going to happen today!”  Since the program was rebooted I was the only vet on that team...and I knew what was going to happen but I kept my mouth shut.  BBC got up by 14 or 15 points and the coach pulled me from defense to offense.  I remember the very skilled freshman we had picked up that year in total shock, just staring blankly ahead.  I said to him sternly, “Hey, we’ve got to kick the ball!  We still have a game to play.”  We finished out that brutal defeat and loaded back up on the van.  The coach had never said much of anything to me before that day.  He knew I had been the former coach and I don’t know what he had been told about me but that day he grasped the truth.  We actually talked some that night and that was nice.  I really respected him and really liked the young kids I was playing with (I had come back to school a few years after graduating from the three year program at the ripe old age of 24 at that time...the “old” man on the team:).  We actually beat one team that season!  That was amazing!

In my writing career I had a BBC moment.  It occurred after I had been a youth pastor for 5 and ½ years and had become the pastor of Austinburg Baptist Church.  One day I thought, “Enough fooling around!  I’m going to write a story that’s good enough to publish and I’m going to finish it!”  I came up with an exotic idea and went for it!  I wrote over two hundred pages and was extremely pleased with the story.  Then my mom came to visit...remember, she is very honest:)  I handed it over to her and she spent sometime reading it.  “Adrian this is terrible!” she said, pointing out several severe flaws in the story.  I had taken my best shot and came up very short!  I was devastated.  Was my mom mean for saying that?  No.  It was the truth.  It was like my coach that couldn’t believe how bad former teams had been beaten by BBC, until he experienced the truth for himself.  After two decades of trying, I realized I wasn’t good enough to be a writer.

That should have been the end of the story for me as a writer but a few years later I started writing again!  It was like I couldn’t help myself!  "Why was I doing this?" I wondered.  I had a whole bin full of stories that were unfinished and I lacked the skill to be an author anyway...so why was I still writing?  It was kind of like playing BBC.  You knew you were going to lose but you faced it bravely and went on with your season.  The problem was my writing wasn't the whole season, it just the game against BBC.  I couldn’t “win” at writing, so why was I even trying?  What was the point of writing if no one was ever going to read it but me?

It’s tough when you reach the end of yourself.  All that positive thinking stuff (yeah I’ve read some books on it) can’t help you in that situation.  I had reached the end of myself and yet here I was still writing.  I did the only thing you can do when you are in an impossible situation.  I cried out to God!

(Note: Davis college had a much stronger basketball program when I went there but I praise the Lord!  I got to start in college as a soccer player and got as much playing time as I could handle!!  I have many great memories of playing at that level.  I went to BBS for about 21 credits as a pastor and enjoyed it very much, so I have nothing against BBC or Summit or whatever it is called today!)