Growing up I always enjoyed playing sports, but I absolutely hated watching them. I played soccer, basketball, volleyball, ran track, and did gymnastics and competitive dance. I remember when I was younger, I would go to football watch parties every Sunday with my family. I never once watched the games, and I would just go play with friends. My mom always thought I would never end up being interested in sports.
What really spiked my interest in watching sports was in high school. Starting my junior year, I finally had friends on varsity football. Now. I felt that I finally had someone to watch and see how they perform. During the middle of the season my junior year, one of my very best friends and football player, Grant Milton, had a brain aneurysm during the second playoff game of the season at Baylor University. He was immediately rushed to the hospital from the sidelines and almost did not make it. He is now unable to speak, move his body, eat, drink, etc. He spends his life lying in a hospital trapped inside his own body. After that game, our community rallied together in support of Grant and continued to go through playoffs in honor of him. He was made honorary captain at each playoff round and every opposing team was their supporting his fight as well. That year my high school ended up making it all the way to state and it was all because the team had the fight in them to do it for Grant.
Those playoff games is when I became the die-hard football lover. Knowing that our team and our community wanted to win for Grant, made it impossible to not watch every single play of the game. I was determined for our team to win because losing made it feel like we were losing Grant. I started becoming angry when bad calls were made and when bad plays had happened, and I became genuinely excited when we would score, make a good play, and obviously win. I never had these sorts of emotions when watching a football game before, but that also could be because I never really watched them.
I realized that sports were so much more entertaining to watch than I originally thought. I soon after starting not only liking to watch football, but also basketball and baseball. I have always been a competitive person and now I realized how my competitiveness could be incorporated with watching sports and not just playing them.
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