How I became a writer Part XXV

Title: How I became a writer

Part: XXV

In track team, oddly enough, team size does not always matter.  Oh, it can help in a week night meet, when a team of sixty girls or boys floods all the events, but even then they are not guaranteed to win the meet.  One year I was facing a huge girls team and we were killing them on the track.  Let me explain... you can put a hundred girls in the 100 dash but for scoring, all the meet cares about is who was 1^st, 2^nd, or 3rd.  You get 5 points for first, 3 for second, and 1 for third.  Thanks to Kendall Austin and Kaitlin Huyler, and other great athletes we were taking first almost every event!  Even if the other team takes 2 and 3^rd place, they only get 4 points to your 5, and if we take 1^st and second, that’s 8 points to their 1!  My score keeper, Adrianna, came running up excitedly when the meet was almost done.  “We are killing them!” she breathed in wonder.  She was new at the scoring gig at that point and not the seasoned vet she would become.  I shook my head.  “Do you see all those girls laboring away in the distance, in field events?  That is where the other team is killing us.”  That year our field was weaker, leaving us vulnerable to another team flooding those events.  If I have no one in that event and the other team can put seven girls in it and it doesn’t matter how bad they are.  They can all throw the discus five feet and take nine points from our team. 

I’ve had all sorts of different kinds of teams.  I had a team one year that I only took six girls to the sectional meet because that’s all that qualified for it!  I was walking out at the end of the night and the head of our league goes, “Oh, here.”  He hands me a plague.  “What’s this for?” I ask, not able to read it at that late hour in the dark.  “Your team was the runner-up team.”  We had come in SECOND????  “HOW?”  I wondered as a new coach?  It was because Kaitlin Smith, Jessica Thomas, Jen Cady, Katie Wyant, Courtney Cornell, and Lauren Foster won a lot of events or placed second or third.  In a major invitational, each first place is 10 points and that day we had a good amount of those!  Still to place second out of sixteen teams with six girls is AMAZING!!!  Katie Wyant was only a seventh grader (she tested up to varsity) then but she had come up through C-G’s summer track program and had a solid idea what she was doing.  She also had amazing work ethic and drive! 

Was it hard after all those girls graduated?  No.  Oh, I missed them, and they were all super heroes, BUT a new generation of girls had come up, with their own stars and unique feel as a team.  The year Meg and Vanessa were my team captains, we didn’t necessarily have sectional superheroes BUT every athlete on that eleven girl squad contributed so much that it was hard for other teams to flood us!  I loved it at week night meets when other teams would throw armies at different events and in most of them they would find a JT girl or two ready to fight them for first!  That team covered the events so well that NOTHING in the field was vulnerable and very few track events were open to them.  I use to say to one of the girls on our team, as we routinely gave them the 3200 relay (the first event up), “we have to spot them an event to be fair!”  My roguish half-smile was met with an impudent grin from the young lady.  We would bloody bigger teams noses good and sometimes even beat them!  One time I was at a meet with two other smaller teams and the coach (who is an awesome guy by the way!  Our league is blessed to have a lot of caring, principled coaches!  It is a huge blessing!) said to me, “It’s hard for our team to compete against bigger teams like yours....” he trailed off, frowning.  We only had eleven or twelve girls ourselves that year.  We just hit other teams so hard it felt like you were facing a massive team!  We were like a wolverine (er, a Wildcat wolverine) that despite its size, you really don’t want to mess with it!

But, I started talking about superheroes, I will give one more story from that era, and not the wolverine era.  What makes a super hero?  Is it just talent?  No.  I have seen girls in the league that are very skilled or talented that I would have no desire to coach.  The Lord has blessed me with very moral girls over the years (a credit to our community and almighty God’s grace) and what makes the super heroes so fun is they were also moral.  Take Katie Wyant.  She was becoming a super star in the league.  A girl that officials would come up to me in awed tones and talk about AFTER she had graduated!!!  Autumn’s favorite pole vault coach, Coach G, was a coach at Katie’s college and had nothing but glowing things to say about her ability and character!  The Hornell Invitational had a picture of Katie on their website for years after she graduated!  Yet none of this went to her head.  In fact, she was very kind.  One invitational, that I called, “A big girl meet,” because of the size of teams we were up against (teams like Binghamton, and Vestal), I asked Katie to do me a favor.  I said to her, “Katie, would you run in the 1600 relay?  I think I you can get the other three girls in the relay ribbons, girls that would probably not get ribbons... especially at this meet.” 

“Sure,” she said, simply.  The other three girls were girls that tried hard but they did not have the talent to get a high place in a small meet, much less this one!”  I think I put Katie up second or third because I didn’t want the relay team to lose hope before Katie got the baton.  A little hope can do amazing things!  Katie did not disappoint!  Despite it being earlier in the season (many of the girls on the other teams had not reached their midseason or post-season strength yet) she pumped out a 60!  The girls relay came in THIRD!!!!  I was so happy!  I'm not sure Katie was always appreciated for her kindness, doing these kind of things.  Even when she got so strong she was in the top five of the entire section (over a hundred schools), she never got arrogant.  It never went to her head.  That is a super hero!  I have been blessed with a lot of stars just like her over the years... I don’t mean quite as talented but with the same character.  It makes coaching a lot easier when you have moral athletes! 

Jonathan Myers was that way.  At first he didn’t want to put down the self-publisher I was dealing with, but one day I opened up to him and shared what was going on.  He couldn’t believe it.  “That is ridiculous!” he complained.  “Adrian, I didn’t want to say anything at first but I’m starting a small press and we would take a peek at your novel.  BUT even if we take a pass, I can show you how to get it published without spending thousands of dollars, with a good product for people, AND a reasonable price!”  My first book did NOT cost $44.99 but rather $21.99 and that’s with a profit margin!  Wow! 

OIP almost didn’t take my first manuscript but the co-owner finally sat down and read the introduction of “An Assumed Risk.”  His comment after that was, “Why didn’t we sign this guy yet?”  Yet like the girls on that relay team, I was not always kind to Jonathan or the other owner, and that is too my shame.  Oh, I didn’t cuss them out or anything but nor did I grasp the favor they were doing me.  There were mistakes with OIP’s first third party novel... some of them embarrassing BUT I was not out thousands of dollars and the book looks amazing!  It has ten illustrations in it and the cover is amazing!!  I was able to call up the big self-publishing company and cancel my contract with them, only losing $287 in the process, instead of $1000 with an unsellable product.  Like Katie, Jonathan is very humble, especially for the industry heights he has been able to hit.  Without him and his friend I would have never become an author.  I don’t know if those girls ever got any other ribbons in track but they got a very nice one the day Katie helped them out!  I’m sure they will show their children and grand children that ribbon from a huge meet with pride.  I glance up at all the books I’ve put out on the self above my head and realize how much I owe Jonathan.  He was the star person who came on my relay team and helped me place.  He taught me the ins and outs of the business of self-publishing.  I was just talking to a self-publishing promotion company within the last two months and realize that guy knew less about the actual industry than I did.  But that is another story for another time:)

(Author Adrian Essigmann has a page on Amazon where all eighteen of his books are listed ((soon to be nineteen:)).  Type in Amazon Adrian Essigmann and click on the link that says, “Adrian Essigmann – Amazon.com” which should take you to his author’s page.)