Football has taught me the fundamental values of teamwork and competition. I have taken those values and hallmarks into virtually every aspect of my life: education, business, and family life. I consider football, not merely a sport, but a life lesson that I treasure to this date.
My fondest memory of football is the first practice of two a days. The smell of the fresh cut grass, the hopefulness of a new season, and the anticipation of the first hit. It is something I miss terribly and I am grateful I have the opportunity to mentor and coach youth football now and give other young men that same memory.
The coach that has had the greatest impact of my life is University of Southern California head coach Pete Carroll. The foundations of his program are current textbooks for how a program should be maintained and how the approach and the attitude towards the game is just as important, if not more so, than the playing of it.
Football is not only America's favorite sport, but it is its most unifying. During the start of the Gulf War, the Super Bowl with Whitney Houston singing the National Anthem unified a nation. You cannot say such lauded things about basketball or baseball. While the first Yankee game after 9/11 was consuming emotionally, there is just something unifying to the nation about football that has no peers.
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