S5 E15.1 - Bonus Episode - Remember the Raptors

I want to start by setting the scene from my perspective.

So this was my seventh grade year.

Mike, this would have been your eighth grade season.

And it was really funny.

So seventh grade is the first year when you can play for your school team.

And it's kind of cool.

It's like full circle now because my son is a seventh grader.

And so this will be kind of cool for him to hear the story.

And he's heard a little bit about it already, but I was all set.

to try out for the school team.

And literally the day before tryouts began, I came down with chicken pox.

I wound up missing that whole week of school.

And because of that, I missed all of tryouts and I couldn't try out for the school team.

Um, but what was, what wound up being a really good thing about that was it allowed me to play the entire season, uh, for our team, the Raptors.

That was our team name.

And, uh, like I said, we're going to get into it, but dad, this was your first time coaching.

Um, so yeah, it wound up being really cool.

I got to play the entire year for you and for that team.

And so that was really cool.

We're going to get into all the reasons why that wound up being such a good thing, but, um, right off the bat.

So for me, I was kind of nervous because I was like, all right, you know, here's my dad, you know, tough guy, somebody that, you know, isn't, isn't mean or anything by any means, but he's a tough guy and he's tough on me.

And, you know, I'm just wondering like, how much of this is he going to be yelling at me every other second to be doing something or whatever.

But then I saw our roster and I realized he wasn't going to have any time for me.

We had all kinds of kids that were just known in school as being troublemakers, as being really tough, really difficult to deal with.

A lot of teachers kind of feared these kids.