My first comments about playing football in high school is that I am glad for the experience, I am thankful for the lifelong friendships that being on my football team provided, and… I would never, ever want my nephews or young cousins to play football. That perspective might seem counterintuitive or hypocritical – it is not, I assure you. I began playing football during my freshman year of high school, which was 1995. Back in 1995, the research and science around the lasting impact of the intense head trauma that one experiences when playing football was not mature yet. That research had not evolved to where we are today, which is the firm understanding that the repeated head trauma that football players endure leads to diminished mental capacities over the course of their lives.

To football’s credit, they have worked to improve the equipment that is used and to enforce new rules to protect players’ heads. I appreciate those improvements and hope that they are the first in many more changes to the game to protect its players. However, I cannot imagine a world where I would endorse the young ones in my family actively engaging in that type of brutality when the function of their brains is what is at risk. No thank you. By the way, both of my brothers were football players (one was a championship football player and the other was the captain of his team) and my cousin was on my football team (we were championship players then and, now, hall of fame players at our high school) and we all completely agree on this point. We all also agree that if one of the next generation of the family wants to play football, then we would talk to them about it and let them make their own decision, but we would discourage them from joining the team.

As for my experience playing high school football, I loved it. I was able to play for one year with my older brother as a senior on the team when I was a sophomore and I got to play all four years with my cousin. In my hometown, I came from a smaller, feeder grade school that fed into a larger high school, so being on the football team was a way for me to meet new friends, integrate into the larger high school, and build a feeling of attachment to the larger community. All of that worked out very well for me and I think it worked out well because I was a good football player (not a great player, but good enough to start on a championship team my senior year). I can never speak ill of the amazing connections that I built from playing football and, ultimately, from wrestling and being on the spring track team (the weight throwing team, not the runners!).

The one area where I have a constructive criticism for high school football and all high school sports is the constant pressing for more reps, practicing longer hours, and doing something “one more time.” In hindsight and across all of the sports that I played, I do not think that there was much benefit to the “one more rep” mentality. In fact, there is a growing chorus of folks who are saying that the “one more rep” mentality is dangerous. I leave that contemporary argument to those who are making it today. In my experience, though, staying a little bit later, pushing to press up a little bit more weight, and spending additional time preparing for an opponent seems like it was a bit much – at least for the high school level of competition.

At some point during my senior year, I started receiving letters from local, small colleges (Division III) to play football for them. I received a few letters about wrestling, too. I did not pursue any of them in a significant way. One day, one of my buddies who was a running back on the team and I were called into a special meeting to meet with a recruiter from a local university that played in what was then-known as Division IAA (today called Division I FCS). To make what could be a long story short, both my buddy and I opted not to play for that college, but both wound up going to school there anyway. I talked to the football coaches at the university at the time and told them that I wanted to get acclimated to college before playing football. They weren’t interested in that, but said if I wanted to, then I could attempt to walk-on to the team after my freshman year and to come and talk to them after the spring semester ended.

As it turned out, I became friends with several of the football players at my college and I even shared a dorm suite with two of them who I became good friends with that year. I also became friends with some of the college freshmen football players that lived in other parts of the campus and they were all really nice guys. At some point, I started lifting weights while in college and at that time the weight room for the students was shared with the athletes. Without gassing myself up too much, I lifted as much or more than the guys who would have been my contemporaries on the college football team. I’m not so arrogant to think that this was purely because I was stronger than some of those guys, but rather I recognized that they were engaged in a specific type of weightlifting where I was just lifting weights for fun. When you become more specific in your training routine, you can naturally reduce the amount of weight that you might lift in certain standard lifts. I think that is what was going on.

After my freshman year, I went and talked to the football coaches and told them I was ready to walk on to the team. I remember talking to one of the coaches and the look of complete disinterest that he had in me and my story (the same guy who was excited about me potentially joining his team 18 months earlier). I think the conversation turned when I mentioned that during my freshman year, I did really well (a 3.9 GPA after my second semester, which he liked) and that I met a bunch of new friends when I joined my fraternity – that went over like a lead balloon. That coach somewhat reluctantly gave me the paperwork that I needed to get filled out from my doctor and told me that once I got him the completed paperwork, he would get me the dates of the walk-on practices.

Well, I got a physical, had the paperwork completed, and sent it in to the coach… and that’s the end of the story. The coach never got back in touch with me, never let me know about when I could try to walk-on, and never initiated contact again. I did not follow-up with him because I believed then, as now, that some things are not worth chasing. After seeing the utter look of disdain on that coach’s face when I mentioned that I lived a great freshman year and a big part of that was joining my fraternity, I knew that this was not going to be a good interaction and that I probably would not want to pursue a long-term connection with that guy. This is another marked difference between the high school and college settings, for me at least – I genuinely liked each of my high school coaches no matter how hard or aggressive they got with me and my teammates. For the college coach to be jumping up and down enthusiastic about me and my buddy joining his team while we were in high school and then completely uninterested 18 months later, it just did not sit right with me.

Overall, I am glad that I did not play football in college. A few months after that awkward interaction with the football coach, a friend and former teammate of mine from high school began playing football at the college. An old injury of his was aggravated during one of the early practices and he may have been encouraged to play through it (common in both high school and college sports). He opted not to play through it and, instead, protect his body (smart move). And I have heard similar stories like that not just locally, but all over the country and not just with football, but all sports.

What I gained by playing football in high school was provided to me by my fraternity. While I have several friends who had excellent college football experiences, I do not think that I would have had a similar experience playing football at my college. And that’s completely okay for me, especially when considering the brain trauma research I mentioned earlier and the wonderful experience provided to me by joining my fraternity and growing a new group of lifelong friends.

This weekend’s links are below for your reading pleasure. If you come across any interesting links, then please share them with us in the comments section below. Enjoy!

Get your weekend started right by checking out these links, starting a new Feedly account, and/or adding the blogs above (and JerseySmarts.com, too) to your existing Feedly or other RSS aggregator account. Enjoy!

I know, having a Trenton-based team play in a southern football league seems weird. However… why not? New Jersey is a densely populated state and we have a bunch of different semi-pro and minor league teams around the state. Why not have an arena football team playing out of Trenton in a southern football league? Lord knows we have some amazing football players in this state, so I’m all for having an arena football team in Trenton.

The game itself was very high scoring and very entertaining. And while I don’t remember the exact score at this point, I do remember thinking that there were an awful lot of touchdowns. But I think what surprised me the most was the fact that if the football made its way into the stands – the fans got to keep the ball! That’s crazy! There were a lot of fans that left the Sun National Bank Center that night with a game ball as a souvenir!

Overall, the game was a lot of fun and there was a lot of high impact action. And it’s almost needless to say, but I really enjoyed watching some football again. Here’s hoping that we can all enjoy some football in a few months…

Take a look at the pictures below to see some of the Trenton Steel game for yourself. And thanks to the team over at Prevention First for including these tickets as a part of a thank you package I received for sponsoring a basketball team in one of their recent charity tournaments. Enjoy the pictures!

Right before my senior year of high school started in September 1999

But I’ll break that laziness out of my body at some point (soon). Moving on…

The second best atmosphere that I ever worked out in was at The Fitness Company in Ocean Township, New Jersey. The Fitness Company has been closed for a number of years and for a few years before the gym actually closed the building itself was under a great deal of development and torn up on the inside. However, before the construction started the atmosphere in that place was awesome. There was a four-foot deep swimming pool as well as a hot tub and six or seven different workout rooms. The rooms ranged from cardio equipment to a spinning room to an isometric machine room to free weights to abdominal stuff and more. Plus, there was a full court basketball court inside the gym and two racketball courts. Inside the men’s locker room was a steam room, too. This was a great place to workout in and my results from working out there showed.

For those of you who have been reading this blog for years, you may remember six or so years ago when I started losing a bunch of weight. I went from about 385 pounds to about 260 pounds and I accomplished that feat by working out at The Fitness Company. My workout regime was so good back in those days – I would go to the gym in the morning and do some cardio for about an hour and then lift weights for about an hour. Afterward, I’d swim in the pool for about an hour and then sit in the steam room for about 30 minutes. Then I went about my day (life was a lot simpler when I was in graduate school and only working part-time). And I’d usually wind up ending the day by heading back to the gym for a nighttime dip in the pool around 8:00pm or 9:00pm.

That was the life – and it was a great atmosphere to work out in. It’s too bad no one ever purchased the old Fitness Company and tried to open it back up as it used to be. The Fitness Company used to have a ton of members and they had great monthly and annual rates, too. What a shame.

Here’s hoping that the atmosphere at the new gym at the local college where I teach (which is where I’ll eventually be working out) is as good or better than these two places!

Oh, this is going to be one of those longer entries that deals with a personal story from my past which I think you might find entertaining. So sit back and relax and read a little bit of my history…

Before I get started with my story, I thought that I would let you know how this memory was dug out of the recesses of my mind. The other day the New York Times published an article that talked about how high school guidance counselors are receiving failing grades from their students. The article says:

Most people who graduated from high school in the last dozen years believe that their guidance counselors provided little meaningful advice about college or careers, a new study has found. And many said the best advice on their futures came from teachers.

“Most young adults who go on to college believe that the advice of their high school guidance counselors was inadequate and often impersonal and perfunctory,” according to the study by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization.

I just fall into that category of people who have graduated high school in the last twelve years. And I can safely say that my high school guidance counselor strongly falls into the category of someone who never gave me “meaningful advice about college or careers.” She definitely “was inadequate and often impersonal and perfunctory.” Frankly, she absolutely sucked at her job and I hope that she didn’t do to other students what she did to me.

Intrigued yet? Read on!

Let me set the stage. I was always an outstanding student. I swept the eighth grade graduation winning almost every academic award that Mount Arlington Public School offered including the Academic Excellence award. It was the same story in high school, where I routinely received straight A’s in honors and advanced placement classes. On top of being a great student, I was a highly involved student, too. I was Vice-President of my Freshman class and then President of my class through Junior year when I became the President of the Student Council for my Senior year. I was a varsity starter on the football, wrestling, and spring track teams and captain of the wrestling team in my Senior year. I was the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association scholar athlete of the year my Senior year in high school. I was in a bunch of honor societies including the National Honor Society. I even wrote for the school newspaper!

Needless to say, I was clearly a highly involved student – and not just “involved” with bullshit clubs that had two or three members. I was one of the leaders in my high school of approximately 1800 students.

So we’ve set the stage.

When a kid like me is getting ready to start applying to colleges, he obviously gets offers from all over the place. Now, I could go into how we were bombarded at my house with letters and packages from colleges who wanted me to apply, but that would detract from the story about how inept my old guidance counselor was during my senior year. So we’ll focus on a few schools – Muhlenberg College, Bloomsburg University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and Monmouth University. Why focus on just these schools? Because these are the ones that I applied to when I was in high school.

In truth, I really wanted to go to Muhlenberg College because my football coach had worked out an arrangement for me to get, essentially, a free ride at the school where I would be playing football and possibly even wrestling in the off season. That’s what I wanted to do and I was glad that an arrangement was being worked out – I even remember meeting with the Muhlenberg College coaches on one of their visits to Roxbury High School my Senior year. In fact, I only applied to the other schools just because I wanted to see what the responses were (although I did apply to Monmouth University because they were also recruiting me to play football – which is a story for another time).

Like any overachieving student, I prepared all of my college applications well in advance of their due dates and brought them to my guidance counselor at Roxbury High School at the beginning of October in my Senior year (this would be October 1998). The reason I had to bring them to my guidance counselor was so she could attach my official transcript and get them out during the early admission period. Roxbury High School also had a service where they sent the entire application package out on behalf of the students, which was great! So, I brought my applications to the guidance counselor, she told me they would be sent off by the end of the week, and that was the end of that process. She also mentioned that sometimes colleges take weeks or even months to get back to the applicants, so I should sit tight for a while.

And I sat tight…

My senior year of football was incredible. We were going at a million miles an hour and we wound up winning the first state championship in Roxbury High School history which was major news in our town. From that victory I went on to become the captain of the wrestling team and I even won one of the winter tournaments that the wrestling team went to each year. I was pretty packed with things going on and while the college letters continued to come in, they eventually stopped coming in altogether at some time in January 1999. I thought this was weird so I asked my guidance counselor what was going on and I also brought up that I hadn’t heard from any of the schools that had I applied to yet. She told me that the applications were sent and that she would follow up with the colleges to see if they had accepted me yet.

My guidance counselor never got back to me with an update.

The months kept going by and I never heard from any of the colleges. Finally, at some point at the end of March 1999 I went in to my guidance counselor’s office and asked her what I should do. She said that she would follow up with the colleges and get back to me (sound familiar?). At this point, I began to get the impression that she was incompetent and that something must be up. I should also comment that I had been keeping my Mom apprised of the situation the entire time…

About two weeks after I went to see my guidance counselor (we’re in the middle of April 1999 at this point), I was called to her office where she told me that I had to sign some paperwork. I signed the paperwork and nonchalantly asked her what it was for. She said that it was for my transcripts to be attached to my applications so they could be sent out.

You guys putting the pieces together here? Can you see what happened here yet? If not, let me make it very clear for you…

My guidance counselor received my college applications in October 1998 and did not send them to the colleges until April 1999!

This idiot finally got around to sending out my college applications half a year after I gave them to her in the first place and months after she had already told me that the applications were sent out! My reaction at the time was, “WHAT?!”

I almost immediately knew that my chances at getting that free ride/double sport package at Muhlenburg College were gone. However, at the time I couldn’t comprehend how this woman even had a job bad of a position my guidance counselor put me in…but my Mom knew what this woman did to me. And Mom took action!

I went home and told my Mom what my guidance counselor told me and, from what I remember, all Hell broke loose! My Mom may need to refresh my memory on what happened next, but she either physically went to the high school or called the high school and went ape shit on this idiot guidance counselor. Like most Moms, my Mom is good at going crazy when other people’s incompetence negatively affects her children. Hey – you don’t mess with someone’s kids, you know? As I recall, I’m pretty sure my Mom threatened this woman with lawsuits and possibly with some physical damage (my Mom doesn’t take any shit from any one – she’ll smack a bitch if the situation calls for it).

From what I remember, after Hurricane Mom dealt with my guidance counselor I was called back into the useless counselor’s office and the woman promised me that she would be calling each college personally to admit that she made a major mistake and that my applications shouldn’t be viewed negatively because of her incompetence. She was also going to try to get me the dual sport package back at Muhlenburg College as well as the various scholarship money that I was eligible for given the fact that I was averaging a perfect 4.0 on a 4.0 GPA basis.

Well, Muhlenburg wasn’t interested so that whole package was gone. Rutgers said that they were interested, but that I was past some deadline for certain types of financial aid and that I’d have to pay most of the tuition. Bloomsburg said that they would take me, but only if I was in their History program (which I didn’t want to be in at all). Harvard never responded. And Princeton said they would be interested, but that they couldn’t offer a financial aid package and that I would have to be in an academic program that I didn’t want to be in (I don’t remember which one it was – something with science, I think). The only one who accepted me on the spot and offered multiple thousands of dollars in scholarship funds was Monmouth University. I accepted the Monmouth University offer and that was the end of my dealings with my completely incompetent high school guidance counselor.

My Mom thought that I had a legitimate lawsuit against the high school and the guidance counselor and I agreed (she probably still thinks I have a legitimate lawsuit). In fact, I think that the incompetence of the woman who was my guidance counselor cut short what was an otherwise meteoric academic rise for me throughout my younger years. I mean look – I was on a roll! And I was going along at the speed of light until I hit the brick wall that was the incompetence of my high school guidance counselor.

Looking back, I was pretty aggravated at how this whole thing went down. At the time, I really wanted to play football in college and I thought that with my grades and extracurricular involvement that I should be qualifying to go to school for free (and I still believe that I should have gotten a free ride in college). Granted, I did have an opportunity to play football at Monmouth University, but it didn’t work out – which, again, is an entry for another time (which most of you will find pretty interesting).

However, I’ve learned many things from my experience with my inept guidance counselor. First, I’ve learned the ins and outs of the entire college admissions process. This is something that no one in my family really knew inside and out prior to me going to college and this fiasco with my guidance counselor. Second, I learned that most high school guidance counselors cannot be trusted to be effective at their jobs (also proven by the New York Times article linked above). And third, I learned that when it comes time for my kids, my nieces, and my nephews (when they’re all born) to apply to college that I would like to take an active role in their application process so that they aren’t screwed over by their guidance counselors like my counselor screwed me over.

I wonder how many other students were academically harmed by this woman’s inability to perform the basic functions of her job. I wonder why she was able to keep that job for so long. I wonder how many students could have gone to Ivy League schools if this woman knew how to do her job correctly. Isn’t it amazing to consider how many lives one person’s incompetence has either ruined or negatively affected?

To end on a good note, though, the other day I went to my old high school’s website and the incompetent moron who served as my guidance counselor is no longer employed by Roxbury High School. Thank God no one else has to suffer getting their legs cut out from underneath them because of that horrible, miserable woman.

This entry deals with something that I uncovered the other day that initially shocked me, then saddened me, but ultimately made me shake my head in disbelief and laugh at other people’s neuroses. I expect that many of you will have a similar reaction. This entry deals with the neuroses or delusions (you decide which one – I’ll use both words throughout this entry) of my former grade school classmates – people who once, a long, long time ago, I considered friends. This is a longer entry that I put together over a few days, so you might only want to read this particular entry when you have some extra time.

First, some background…

Grade School in Mt. Arlington
My family moved to Mount Arlington in Morris County in the summer of 1988. We moved from Manhattan because our family grew by one when my younger brother was born on Christmas in 1987. We arrived in New Jersey just in time for me to enter the second grade at the local elementary school. Since I was coming in from a Catholic school in New York, I obviously knew none of the kids in the local elementary school and thus didn’t have any friends when I started at the elementary school. It was no big deal, really, because in second grade you become friends with kids just by sitting next to them which is exactly what happened to me.

The kid that I sat next to in all of my classes in the second grade (and, actually, until I graduated eighth grade) was a kid named Brian. He was a great guy and we were buddies. Unfortunately, Brian passed away a few years ago after fighting some diseases (I believe it was a form of cancer). But when I was younger, Brian was one of my first friends in the new grade school and we continued to talk and bullshit once in a while through high school and after I went away to college. He was a good guy. Anyway, as you might expect, it took a matter of weeks for me to become friends with everyone in the second grade. One of the reasons why this was so easy to do was because there were only 40 or so kids in the entire grade and I also participated in local recreation sports (soccer in the fall, basketball in the winter, and little league in the spring). Plus, living in a somewhat small town, it’s not that hard to get to know everyone!

That was the beginning of me making friends in Mount Arlington. While I didn’t know any of the local Mount Arlington people, I did know all of the kids that lived in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, one of my best friends (who is my age) and his younger brother (who is a year or two younger than us) went to a different elementary school in a nearby town (Roxbury). The local town boundaries are drawn weird in my part of the town and it made it such that some of the kids in my neighborhood went to one school and some went to another; one of those weird things you’ll only find in a New Jersey small town!

Anyway, I had a great time in grade school and by the time I reached the eighth grade, I had a lot of good friends in Mount Arlington. As I recall, I only got into one fight in seventh grade with some weird kid who moved into town for a few months and then promptly moved out. I was an outstanding student (one of these days I’ll write an entry on here about my eighth grade graduation, where I swept every major academic award at the graduation ceremony – it was honestly ridiculous – ask my family).

Moving on to Roxbury High School and Sports
When my eighth grade class graduated, I think that the majority of us were all excited to move on to high school. The local high school was comprised of some 1400 to 1500 students. About 1200 of these students came from the neighboring Roxbury school district while 200 or so came from Mount Arlington. In other words, the kids from Mount Arlington were an extreme minority in Roxbury High School.

Honestly, I was never bothered by this because I never really had the time to think about being in the minority.

I never had any time to think about this because I chose to be highly involved in Roxbury High School. I played football, I wrestled, I ran track (okay, I threw shot put, which doesn’t exactly constitute an act of “running”), I ran for – and won – four different student government positions. By my senior year I became what the made-for-TV movies would call “popular” or a “big man on campus” without even trying to be either – it just happened organically as a result of my participation and excellence in these various activities (to toot my own horn for a moment).

But we’ll get to my senior year soon enough…

Getting back to freshman football, anyone who played football at Roxbury during the late 1990’s can tell you that we practiced a lot! I spent the bulk of my free time during the summer before my freshman year at football practice. Anyone who has ever played on a good sports team can also tell you that when you play a sport with a bunch of guys at a relatively young age, you become very good friends and you create a bond. In fact, to this day on a weekly basis I still speak to some of the guys that I played football and wrestled with in high school.

One of the great things for me playing football at Roxbury was that some of my neighborhood friends played on the football team so I was getting to play a sport with some people that I had been friends with for a long, long time (before we moved to Mount Arlington in 1988). Plus, my cousin (who is actually only 5 days younger than I am) moved into town and he played on the freshman football team, too. My older brother also played, but he was on the Varsity squad with some of the other neighborhood guys.

Over the years we grew into a very tight football team and eventually won the school’s first state championship in that sport. Many of us also wrestled on the same team for four years; by the end of our senior year we had become a very close group of friends. Like I said above, here we are today – fifteen years after I met some of these guys for the first time and almost eleven years after we all graduated from high school – and we all still talk regularly. Those guys are great and I think that every guy should have that level of camaraderie while in high school.

Queue the Psycho Music
But I began this story in Mount Arlington because that’s where the neurotic or delusional people in this story come from…

At some point between graduating eighth grade and some time in high school (I can’t pinpoint when, exactly), a small portion of my buddies from Mount Arlington began to dislike me. Don’t ask me why this happened because I am nowhere near the level of psychotic necessary to fully understand where these people are coming from on this one. I just know that during my senior year of high school my girlfriend at the time informed me that three or four guys from Mount Arlington didn’t like me any more.

At the time, I flabbergasted by this revelation. I couldn’t imagine why these guys didn’t like me! I didn’t have any of these guys in my classes in high school because I was taking the honors curriculum and, other than a few of the girls that I went to grade school with, there weren’t many of my former Mount Arlington classmates in my classes. I definitely never went out of my way to be mean to these guys or anyone, really. The last meaningful conversations that I had with any of the guys from Mount Arlington were in grade school before we graduated and like I said earlier, they were friendly and cordial. In fact, I distinctly remember going to one of their birthday parties at a local army base and going over to one of their houses to watch a football game (must have been the Super Bowl, I don’t remember).

I was “friends” with these two or three kids, make no mistake about it. Were we good friends? Eh, it’s hard not to be good friends with everyone when you’re in a class of about 40 kids for seven years so I’d say we were good friends. Were we best friends? Definitely not. But we were good friends.

So What Was the Problem?
From what I’ve heard (and, again, I’m thinking back over eleven years ago to something that my girlfriend at the time told me) these two or three guys began to dislike me because they thought that I “forgot where I came from.” Well, that’s a nice little catchphrase for high school kids to throw around, but it really doesn’t hold any water once you apply it to the reality of my situation as I outlined above.

So while I think that these guys were being a little bit delusional, I also think that I know what happened here.

We went to Roxbury High School and I was the only one who began playing football; I was the only guy who began running for (and winning) school-wide offices in student government; I was the only guy who wrestled and eventually became the Captain of the wrestling team. Like I said earlier, I was one of the few guys from Roxbury who wound up being considered a “big man on campus” (a distinction that I didn’t care about nor did I ever seek to achieve – these things happen organically). Oh, and by the way, I hate the term “big man on campus.” I’d prefer to say that I was a student that was actively engaged in his personal success, the success of his teammates, the success of his high school, and the success of his extended hometown. But since more people probably understand what high school was like when I use that cheesy “big man” phrase, so be it.

You get the point.

I went to high school and excelled at all of these sports with teammates who were primarily from Roxbury (i.e. not my classmates from grade school in Mount Arlington). Bear in mind that my best friends from my neighborhood (which was essentially Roxbury) and my blood-related family (my older brother and cousin) were also on these teams, too.

What it boils down to is that when we arrived in high school, I did my thing and these two or three guys did their thing…except part of their thing was telling each other and then agreeing with each other that I “forgot where I came from.”

Talk about surrounding yourself with “yes” men!

Since I learned that these guys didn’t like me as my Senior year was coming to a close, it didn’t really affect me in high school. And, because I had zero interactions with these guys after eighth grade, them choosing to not like me did not effect me in college or graduate school and it doesn’t effect me today. For those of you in your late 20’s – put yourself in my shoes. If someone that essentially faded into the background while you were in high school didn’t like you because of their own neuroses and you didn’t know about it – could that possibly have any effect on you? I thought not.

For comparison’s sake, think of it like any of the actors on Saved by the Bell finding out that one of the background characters who filled a seat during the classroom scenes saying that they didn’t like one of the characters on the show. Except in my case, these people weren’t even in the seats in my classes!

And if I am going to be completely honest, then I should say that my life has been so filled with a variety of ups, downs (mostly ups), events, volunteering, work, school, etc. that these people occupy 0.00% of my mental energy. In other words, I completely forgot about them. It happens – I guarantee that there are people that you went to school with that you forgot even existed. Think about it…

Okay Joe, But What’s the Point?
That’s a good deal of background information to digest, so you might watn to take a break at this point.

Back? Good!

Through a weird series of clicks on Facebook the other day I was reminded of these couple of guys and their dislike of me. I clicked on one link that took me to another link that took me to another link (you’ve all been on Facebook, I’m sure you know what it’s like when you see something that catches your eye). Ultimately, I wound up on this little photo-based website that one of these guys put together. The website was put together for their little clique of twenty or so people that hung out with each other back during high school (hey, I wasn’t invited to hang out – maybe I should be the one harboring ill will towards them! LOL).

Calvin Pissing

I’m sure you’ve all seen that picture of Calvin the cartoon character pissing on something. For your viewing pleasure, I’ve included it here. Well, when I clicked on the “opinions” page of that poorly put together website, I saw Calvin pissing on someone’s head. The image looked like it was put together during the stone age of the internet, when people used MS Paint to create crude versions of what Adobe Photoshop does with ease today. I looked at the picture of Calvin pissing on that head and I swore that something looked familiar. I could barely make out the face on the head because the quality was incredibly poor, but I swore that the head that Calvin was pissing on looked a lot like…me!

I sat and looked at that picture for a minute and went through the mental index of pictures of myself in my head. I was trying to figure out what picture my head could have been cropped from and after a minute or two of thinking, I singled out which picture it had to be. A few years ago I scanned all of my physical pictures to an electronic library that I keep on my computer, so I went to that electronic library and lo and behold – I found the suspected picture. Just to be sure, I blew up the picture of Calvin pissing on my head, put it side by side with the picture in my electronic library, and I found a perfect match (albeit a much, much lower quality image from the website).

Wow. That’s Weird. So What?
At the beginning of this entry I said that I was initially shocked and saddened when I saw this picture, but then I ultimately shook my head in disbelief and laughed it off. And that’s exactly what happened. When I placed that head as my own, I was shocked. When I realized that these were my “good friends” from grade school who created the crude image, I was saddened. Finally, when I realized that these people clearly have a deep level of neurosis or delusional thoughts about me and why they went one way in high school and I went another, I actually began laughing out loud. How could I not find the humor in this!?

Think about it.

Here are two or three guys that I literally did not have one thought about through my entire time in high school until my girlfriend brought them back to my attention for a few minutes. Here is a small group of guys that, I kid you not, I have not had one thought about since high school until I stumbled across this little website the other day. I could probably count on two hands the amount of minutes that I’ve spent thinking about any of these people in the last fifteen years.

In the mean time, these people are so neurotic about me and how I rose to be a popular kid in high school that they put my head underneath Calvin’s piss stream! Ha ha ha!!! How great is that?! They created this negative energy about me and then obsessed over that negative energy while I only had enough time in my day to practice football, practice wrestling, and do my school work! They actually spent time in their day finding ways to feed their irrational dislike of me while I forgot that they existed!

I’ve spent the last fifteen years living a life free and clear of any ill will and this picture shows me that they have, in part, obsessed over how much they believe their own bullshit fairy tales! Ha ha ha! Meanwhile, I haven’t devoted one minute of my time to their obsession! I win!

But Joe, You Must Have Been Mean to Them, Right?
The funny thing is that I never disliked any of these guys (or the 20 or so other people that they probably infected with their negativity). In fact, I always had a great affection and consideration for all of my old grade school friends. How could I not have a great admiration for my friends from grade school? As I recall (and I admit that I’m thinking back over twenty years – many of which are clouded by vodka – so my memory might be fuzzy), we all always had a good time in grade school. And as for the few folks from Mount Arlington who traveled in the same circles as I did in high school – we had a lot of fun, too. I went to my ten year high school reunion a few months ago and I saw two people that I went to school with in both Mount Arlington and Roxbury and it was great to see them – we had an awesome time catching up with what everyone was doing with their lives.

But for these few guys, I guess in their warped world view I must have “forgotten where I came from.”

Ha ha ha!!!

How could I have forgotten where I came from? When we all entered the high school, I kept in touch with as many of the Mount Arlington kids as possible. Between being involved in student government, playing football, and trying my damnedest to get Advanced Placement credits in the honors program I didn’t have that much time to speak with every single classmate that I knew! And how does one who is building bonds with his teammates, which include his blood-related family members as well as kids that he’s known since he was very young, forget where he is coming from? That is, by far, the most ridiculous catchphrase that these guys could have thrown their support behind.

Let’s think about what their version of remembering where one comes from must include. In their version, I would have to remain in my hometown no matter what the outside world had to offer. In other words, there would be no football, no wrestling, no student government…hell, no college, no living down the shore for the last ten years, no jobs too far from home, no knowledge of anything outside of the little bubble that is Mount Arlington in Morris County, New Jersey. Unbelievable! And how is it that I forgot where I came from when none of these ridiculous rules applied to these two or three guys when they went off to college and moved to various parts of the state? But let’s not let reality ruin the delusions.

Frankly, if I wanted to take a negative, self-indulgent stance like these few guys have taken, then I might suggest that it was they who abandoned me once we entered Roxbury High School! Of course, I can see the complete insanity that believing such rubbish would require and I’m just not that far away from sanity.

And In Conclusion…
What it comes down is that – even more than a decade after graduating high school and fifteen years after graduating grade school – these people have an irrational hatred in their hearts. They have the type of hate that you find in the worst people on this planet and I find it really shocking.

In the end, I’ve always liked these people because after we graduated from Mount Arlington, I never created a false reality about what their motives were during our high school years. My last true interactions with them were in grade school and those interactions were awesome. When we entered high school and I was preoccupied with living a very exciting, very full life, these guys created a fairy tale regarding me forgetting my Mount Arlington roots. Side note – wouldn’t my roots be in Manhattan? Oh well, let’s not ruin their story.

At this point in my life (and their lives, I’d imagine), I find this absolutely hilarious. I believe that their neuroses and delusions are for them and their psychiatrists to figure out. For me, though, my last meaningful memories of these people were good ones until I found that childish image on one of their weird websites last Monday.

Since I’m not a bitter, angry, hateful person like they clearly are and since I harbor no ill will towards any of them, I hope that they enjoyed creating their little picture and their fairy tales all of those years ago. Hey, sometimes people are weird and I guess I found out that this group of people is just a weird group. Good for them! Be weird! More the power to you! Even after finding that picture and finding the real hate in their hearts, I still only wish the best for them and their little clique.

Some Final Words
And so here we are after nearly 4,200 words in this entry. I hope that this entry does some justice to these delusional people. I hope by acknowledging their irrationality I can bring some closure to their fairy tale – hopefully I can bring them a, “And they lived happily ever after.” Yay!

There is so much more that I could write about this story and this little group of guys. There are more twists and turns in the story that I wish I knew more about. For example, one of these three guys from Mount Arlington that decided they didn’t like me had a huge crush on my girlfriend in high school. However, since I didn’t interact with their little clique, there was no way for me to know that he had a thing for her (plus, it wouldn’t have stopped me from making my move). He felt like I was sweeping in and stealing the object of his desires right in front of him (which is true, I guess). I don’t really know much more about the situation than that, so I can’t really talk more about it (but how great could that part of the story be, huh?).

Back in the real world, though, I know that I’ll forget about these guys and their pettiness and hatred for another decade or two. In truth, I’ve already forgotten about them multiple times during the last week! I’m sure that their psychiatrists will suggest that they do the same with me.

I hope you enjoyed that brief look into my grade school and high school world! There are many more tales from Mount Arlington and Roxbury that have yet to be written. Maybe I’ll run across another picture or person on Facebook that dislodges another memory!

As for some comments on the game…

The Gaels celebrate after winning the North 1, Group IV state sectional title (Daily Record)

But I do think it’s necessary to say that EOC is a nice little team and they played GREAT football for about 5 minutes in the fourth quarter. That said, they had the worst special teams that I’ve ever seen on any football team, ever. Ever! If EOC’s punts made it 20 yards (including rolling after the ball landed), then that would be far. The truth is that EOC was outclassed in every possible way today. Granted, I take nothing away from those kids because I know from experience that you have to work very hard to get to the state championship game, but damn – I was absolutely shocked at how substandard their level of play was for most of the game. They weren’t really strong competition for Roxbury at all. It was shocking, really.

The Gaels celebrate (Photo by Joyce Bambach)

And then the fake punt came and went nowhere – Roxbury got the ball back. When the entire stadium knows you’re going to go for a fake, then the surprise effect of the play tends to go away, don’t you think? Horrible play calling; definitely not state championship caliber.

Roxbury, on the other hand, did a good job on both sides of the ball as well as with their play calling. I’m sure that this wasn’t Roxbury’s best game that they’ve ever played, but the team definitely got the job done without question. The crowd was into it, the fans showed up in force, and EOC was an inferior opponent in every way. It was the perfect set up for Roxbury to bring home its second state championship in football! Congratulations to the new state champions – an accomplishment well deserved.

And an additional congratulations to my friend and former teammate from the 1998 team, Justin, who is now an assistant coach for Roxbury. If I’m not mistaken, Justin is now the only person in Roxbury history to win two state championships in football – one as a player and one as a coach. We’re proud of you, buddy.

Click the pictures below to see a larger image.

Me with the 1998 State Title at Giants Stadium

12/5/2009 UPDATE: ROXBURY HIGH SCHOOL BEATS EAST ORANGE CAMPUS

Earlier tonight, the Gaels decimated Fair Lawn by 42 to 7 to earn a trip back to the state championship game for the first time in 11 years. Incidentally, the last time Roxbury was in a state championship football game, I was one of the starting defensive tackles – and we won (see the picture of me to the left holding the state trophy after we won the first on-field championship in school history). With that in mind, I was glad to read this in the Star-Ledger post-game report:

Chris Biank ran 11 times, gained 113 yards and scored four touchdowns for Roxbury (10-1), which will play East Orange Campus, its former rival from the Iron Hills Conference, for the state sectional championship in two weeks.

Roxbury will seeking its first title since it defeated Plainfield, 7-6, in the North Jersey, Section 2, Group 4 final on that day in 1998. Plainfield is the Cardinals and its helmet is a replica of Arizona team’s of the NFL.

That was a good day back in 1998. I really hope that the current team gets to experience how great of a feeling it is to win a state championship. I haven’t watched a Roxbury football game in years – since my younger brother graduated from the high school a few years ago. But I’m looking forward to finding out where and when the state championship game will be taking place and being in attendance to watch my team bring that state championship back home!

Roxbury is going to be playing against East Orange in the state championship. I have to admit, when we used to play East Orange when I was playing for Roxbury back in the late 1990’s, we pretty much shut them out each year. So the fact that East Orange is in a state championship game is somewhat surprising to me. I can’t picture them as a championship caliber football club, but then again I’m basing that opinion off of a team that I last saw in action about a decade ago – when we shut them out my senior year.

The headline in one of the local papers after we won the state title in 1998:

The headline after we won the state championship in 1998

In any event, I’m incredibly proud of the current football team and I know I speak for the rest of the guys from our 1998 team when I wish them the best of luck in the state game. We want these guys to win the state championship, break our record for wins in a season, and break the football state championship drought in Roxbury more than anyone else! Go for it guys – keep making us and the rest of Roxbury proud!

From a student’s perspective, isn’t summer vacation the long-promised break from the oversight of teachers and principals? I strongly believe that students of all ages should utilize their summer months to do everything that they should be doing. I put emphasis on “should” in the previous sentence because different students, at different ages, should be doing different things. For example, an athletic student in high school might be best served by spending his summers working a part-time job and spending the rest of his time preparing for the upcoming football or soccer season. Imagine if all student athletes had the benefit of three to four months of additional training during the summer. Wouldn’t that benefit their long-term goals as an athlete in college and beyond?

Similarly, some students should be spending their summer months working a little bit more than part-time jobs. Why? Because some students should be banking money to help bankroll their college expenses or to help their families succeed on an everyday basis. Which begs the question…how much is too much for our students to bear during the summer months?

Do our students really need to worry about how they’re going to score on a test during the first few days of schools when it is the middle of July? Further, for those students who must work a job or who have opted to take an internship in the summer – should they also be burdened with reading two or three books and putting together a book report on what they’re discovered?

Further, do educators need to be concerned about whether or not their assignments are being properly followed throughout the summer months? What happens when a student refuses to do their book report and other students see that he only gets a few points off his total grade in the class? Doesn’t the overall impact of summer homework then become less effective? And won’t students pass along that information to future generations?

I’m ambivalent towards the issue. Frankly, I think that instead of burdening our students with additional homework in the summertime, I think our society would be better served be educating our students on finding their own sources for information. In other words, teach our students at a young age that they should read the newspaper at least once each week and that they should read a news-based magazine at least once per month. And while on that topic, we should educate our students to understand that it is okay for them to read a magazine like Maxim or Glamour, but that they should not be using these outlets as their primary source of finding information.

If we could manage to restructure our educational system to educate our students towards real world ways of gaining new knowledge, we might be able to fix the growing gap between the test scores of American students versus our counterparts in Japan, Germany, and other Western countries. It all starts in youth, though. In this digital age, we need to teach our younger students how to find out information on their own and to know the difference between hard news, opinion, and entertainment.

Once we achieve that, we won’t have to worry about assigning homework in the summertime.

Prior to tonight’s event being publicized a few weeks ago, I had no concept of Mr. Nantz and his accomplishments nor had I ever attended a MACE Award presentation. Going into tonight, I really had no idea what to expect. By the end of the night, though, I was very pleased that I decided to attend.

Mr. Nantz has a wonderful speaking voice which is in the style of your classic broadcaster. His voice is not overmodulated to any great degree and he knows how to use the tones in his voice to accentuate a story. Sitting and listening to him talk in a conversation-style format for about an hour wasn’t aurally aggravating in the least. In fact, the tone and scope of his stories were both appropriate and relevant to today’s college students (many of the audience members were current undergraduates at the university). I thought that the organizers of this event chose the perfect format for Mr. Nantz to discuss his career with young minds, his professional colleagues, and other members of the university and local business community.

The entire event was very well produced and it came off very professionally. Two videos were shown on the beautiful scoreboard in the new MAC Center (the scoreboard was lowered so as to avoid strained necks). The first video highlighted the Department of Communication at Monmouth University and I have to admit that I learned a great deal about the program from that brief informational piece. While I thought that there were one or two stiff performances on the video, I was very impressed with the diversity of viewpoints presented – from current undergraduates to recent alumni to current professors and more. It was a very well produced piece.

The second video was shown towards the end of the night and it was a highlight reel of Mr. Nantz’s career. I enjoyed watching that video because there were some great sports moments included (which I can now associate with Mr. Nantz). I think the video may have been produced by CBS Sports, but it was a great, comprehensive review of Mr. Nantz’s accomplishments in sports broadcasting.

At the very end of the night Mr. Nantz announced that he was making a donation to the Department of Communication to name a classroom in honor of one of his great friends. That friend is Eli Spielman – the gentleman who co-authored Mr. Nantz’s book, Always by My Side: The Healing Gift of a Father’s Love. I’m not sure if this was a planned move by the Department of Communication to generate more donations for the program, but it was definitely a classy move for Mr. Nantz. The announcement didn’t seem rehearsed at all so it could have very well been an act of benevolence on behalf of Mr. Nantz. In any event, it was a great way to end a very classy evening.

Monmouth University has, again, impressed me and Mr. Nantz was a great honoree with a great spirit. All in all the 2009 MACE Award presentation was a good, well-run event.

Update: Click here to download a PDF copy of the Asbury Park Press article regarding Jim Nantz winning the MACE Award.