Five Years, Same Decade, Different Me
This is me looking up at the scoreboard at Sun Life Stadium…probably noticing how large and awful I look on a much larger screen (2014 Capital One Orange Bowl, Photo: Danny Karnik).
As the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2015, confetti hit me in the face while it rained from the heavens above Sun Life Stadium in celebration of Georgia Tech’s 49-34 win over Mississippi State. Standing on the field and looking up at members of the Yellow Jackets football team on the dais with the Orange Bowl trophy was the moment I realized that this wasn’t what I wanted anymore.
I felt the writing on the wall during the previous few months with my new boss and the current football coach. I knew when I didn’t belong somewhere, and I didn’t belong there. But for some reason, that moment on the field remains so vivid in my memory because when the confetti hit my face, it was as if I had an epiphany. I was miserable. I was depressed. I was overweight. I was insulating myself in an unhealthy way.
I stumbled upon this 2014 Orange Bowl photo a few weeks ago, and the tipping point came over me like a tidal wave of emotions.
That was five years ago. While that was the moment when I realized I was done, it would take another year before that would come to fruition (not by my choice but it happened nonetheless).
So why I am thinking about such a painful time in my professional career? Simple: that moment of witnessing the Orange Bowl win, being a football communications director, being motherfucked and humiliated by a coach, the moments of feeling less-than and the feeling of not belonging at Georgia Tech…it would not matter five years later. None of it matters. Yes, it had some short-term effects on my personal and professional growth, but in the story of my life, it doesn’t deserve more than five minutes of my time.
Standing on that field was the culmination of those feelings. I realized that everything that I had worked so hard to achieve and that I thought was worth so much in my life…wasn’t worth it at all. It didn’t make me a better person. It didn’t make me a better husband or father. I’d argue it made me a worse person all around. Being self-aware enough that I needed a change at that moment allowed me to be a better person.
This story is one of many I want to tell in greater detail as part of a book about the highlights and lowlights of being a college sports information director. I don’t know if this book will happen, if a publisher will be interested, or if any SIDs will be willing to share stories about their journey, but I know there are stories worth telling and that there is more to life than games, stats, and the countless job responsibilities of the college athletics labor force.
