Greetings to you at Jones T Shirts, this opportunity could not have come at a better time and I believe that timing is everything when it comes to realizing dreams. I have had a very long meandering road to get where I am in being in the last quarter of my Masters of Sports Leadership with Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In order to explain how I have gotten to where I am allow me to tell you what has driven me. The tender elements of desiring to see my family well and wealthy, the power of dreaming, and plain grit has kept me stable in these 29 years of living. I have had my heart broken in two ways that will never allow me to settle for average again in life.
The first setback was my mother's battle with Alzheimer's disease and Type II Diabetes from my late teens and into my early twenties. The second setback was my athletic career that went down the wash with my sacrifice to be there for family. You see for a young African-American male with a dream, no college savings, and a resolve to win - I made a way in a very non-traditional way. Instead of the glorious path of chasing a football dream until no end, even if it meant moving 1,000 – 2,000 miles away from home, I had to be more creative concerning that phase of my dream career. Instead of a guaranteed ticket to being an Athletic Administrator through the small college route of being a student and playing football for example at places like – Northeastern University, Slippery Rock University, Salve Regina University, Stony Brook University, Fordham University, or Lehigh University - and then becoming a graduate assistant coach, I had to act in compromise to get where I need to be.
That compromise really hurt me, especially now that I have a fresh perspective in 2015 from recent travels that I was only one great day of air travel from my dreams; these are things I didn't know in 2003-2004 as I wasn't well-traveled.