Sunday, Dec 2, 2012
Garza County News

TGP

Choices and Consequences

The Coach's Corner

Published Nov. 30, 2011 @ 6 a.m.

Each and every one of us is a product of the choices that we make every minute of every day.  If you choose to eat too much and not exercise the equivalent amount of calories off, you will gain weight.  If you do this day in and day out you will be overweight.  It is a conscious decision to put food into your mouth and it is a conscious decision to get up and walk it off or not.  You cannot accidentally eat anything.

If you choose to smoke or use tobacco, you have chosen, by some statistics to lessen your live by 12 minutes.  Each time you use tobacco products you are constricting your arteries and damaging living cells in your body and on average, you will die 12 minutes sooner every time you choose to use.

If you choose not to workout outside of school or in the summer, you have chosen to put yourself behind your opponents, at risk of injury in practice, and you will not be competitive in games.  If you are injured you cannot workout and then you get further behind.  It is not bad luck; it is a result of a choice you made when you decided to not work out.

When you choose to drink or put other chemicals in your body, you have chosen to kill cells in your body.  Your body is the only one you have and doing damage to it intentionally makes no sense.  When you choose to mistreat it, you have chosen to give yourself a poor chance for success.

Living in America, you have the greatest freedom of anyone else in the world to make choices on your own.  You are the one and only person who can decide what you want in life and make the choices to those ends…..BUT, you are also the only person in the world responsible for those choices, not McDonald's, not Marlboro, not Coors, only you are responsible for your choices.

If you are going to dance, you must pay the fiddler.  In other words, for every choice you make, there is a consequence. 

Imagine a young man, fresh out of school and on the hunt for a job.  He goes to his first interview with spiked hair, earrings and a tattoo or two showing.  He isn’t shaved and he does use good manners and etiquette when speaking.  Does this young man have the right to dress, appear, and talk like he does?  Of course he does.  He has the right, but through his choices, he has eliminated a large percentage of people who will want him representing their business.

In all my years of coaching and teaching, I have never heard a person tell me how proud he was that he had chosen to quit athletics.  You lose out on one of the few institutions in a young person’s life that teaches teamwork, the benefits of physical fitness and how to be competitive in life’s many situations.  Athletics teaches discipline and commitment.  Most importantly, athletics teaches a lesson about thinking about the consequences before making a choice. 

All of us would be better served if we stopped and thought about the consequences of our choices each day.  Choose to be better, choose to be an example and choose to be Bold Gold.

 
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