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By the time I hit high school, I was consumed by football. After all, I’d played the game since pee-wee league and started nearly every season of my football career. I was a good runningback and linebacker, but my skill was in leadership, landing a spot my senior year as co-captain of the Oak Hill High School football team.

I’ve always been a big dude; I never had to spend a lot of time lifting weights like my teammates because I was naturally strong. I’m sure it came from the daily grind of living on a farm, feeding animals, carrying slop buckets, hauling tires, cutting down trees. Of course, my strength coupled with my ability to lead helped me to excel on the field.

By my senior year, I knew I was good enough for the college ranks and had begun receiving scholarship letters from recruiters across the state. I thought football was going to be my life. To me, it represented character and tenacity. Maybe I’d even make it to the professional level, I thought.

My love for playing the game, however, did a 180 when it came time for the North-South football game. Every year, a group of West Virginia senior standouts were picked to play in this momentous standoff. Essentially, it gave players with aspirations to play college football more opportunities to be seen by recruiters. I was excited by the opportunity because throughout my high school football career, I’d never had a chance to compete in a playoff or championship situation.

I approached my high school football coach about the game and what it would mean to me, and he told me he would check into it because we’d had a good season. It turned out my coach was chosen as one of the coaches for the South team, so I figured I was set. After all, he knew what kind of player I was.

Coach was allowed to pick two players from Oak Hill. To my disappointment, I wasn’t one of them. I could swallow not being chosen, but it was the way the message was delivered to me that was so disheartening. I was sitting in class one day when it was announced over the school intercom that David Locant and Gary Canabery were selected to participate in the game. I was heartbroken because I thought my coach owed me the honor and respect to tell me personally why I wasn’t chosen. Now I see it as a life lesson about character, but as a young man, it totally destroyed my passion for the game. I just wasn’t ready to experience that kind of disappointment again, I told myself.

The summer after high school graduation, I decided I didn’t care about football. That’s when I settled on Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va., a major university a little less than two hours from Oak Hill. During my fall semester, though, I attended all the home football games and that old feeling came back. I decided to walk on the Marshall team that spring, but the day before tryouts, I hyper-extended my knee playing basketball. The doctor gave me the bad news: I tore the meniscus in my knee and would need surgery. That was the end of my football career. Guess it wasn't meant to be.