football angst

So we’re about three weeks away from the start of football practice. My son stands 5’1” and weighs between 80 to 85 lbs. I think he’ll be ready as far as cardiovascular conditioning. I’m just concerned about him getting hurt because he’s so small. He’s been hitting the weights, but it’s unlikely that he’ll gain 15+ lbs. of muscle in three weeks. Some of the kids in his class are much larger than me already, and I’m tipping the scales at 180 lbs. these days.
I was pretty slight at his age, however, even though I was taller and weighed more. Yes, I played football, but quit after playing j.v. my sophomore year. I started on defense and offense my freshman and sophomore years, more out of default than anything else. I played football just to have something to do and the neighborhhod kids and I grew up playing pick-up games at the elementary school or vacant lots near our homes.
I loved the first day of pads, because I genuinely enjoyed hitting people. You could take out a whole day’s frustration by lowering your shoulder pads into someone’s gut. The THWACK of hard plastic against hard plastic gave me a thrill. I couldn’t cover worth a crap (I played defensive back) or catch very well (slot back), so I just focused on hitting people.
I was a bit of a late bloomer, didn’t really hit my stride in sports until I was already at university, either playing intramurals or pick-up games. I played a lot of football with B’s brothers and cousins and their friends during the early part of our relationship. We played in the snow, played in the mud and rain, played whenever we could get at least four players on the field. I was usually the smallest guy out there, but after awhile was always one of the first picked for teams.
Playing pick-up games when I was growing up, I was usually the last one picked. I didn’t realize that I could be quick and could outrun the other players. I was even worse in an organized settting—I would get confused or flustered at game time. I gave up some big plays on defense and never picked up any yardage on offense. Part of it was confidence—I simply didn’t have any, but I didn’t really fill out until I was tweny or twenty-one.
I stopped growing (vertically) by the time I was fourteen, just shy of 5’8” (yes, I’m short), only weighed about 120 lbs. at the time. I tried lifting weights of course, but never saw any results so I would just give up after a couple of weeks. The summer of my junior year, I decided to hang up the cleats and ran cross country instead. Not a bad idea in retrospect—we ended up moving further out into the suburbs midway through the year—to a football powerhouse that played for the state title my senior year. It’s very unlikely that I would have even made the team if I had gone to try-outs.
When I met my wife, I had been working out for about nine months, pretty religiously. I was around 155 to 160 lbs., in the best shape of my life, really. As she said recently—“you got the girl, what else do you want?—so I guess it turned out for the best.
I just wonder, though—what if I had been able to be that size or my size right now when I was still playing? What if I had been able to dominate at that level? I could hang with Minx and Noogie—both of whom are 6’0”, 185 to 225 lbs.—when we played pick up games out in the field. The organized setting is quite different, though, so someone dominating a five-on-five game might just be average on an eleven-on-eleven setting. And I still would have been small by high school standards.
As for Z-Man, I just don’t want him to get hurt. He’ll be the smallest guy out there, and he’s got quickness, but no speed. He’s got something that I didn’t have though—the kid is fearless. When he played soccer, he’d charge guys that were a foot taller than him and take the ball away from them. His physical development has been slowed and perhaps altered by all the medications that he’s had to take these past eleven years, but he has the heart of a warrior. Perhaps it’s because of what he’s been through or perhaps his mother and I managed to do something right somewhere along the way.