Work hard Play hard

Work hard, play hard is something that really kind of hit me. I mean it’s not really much, but one day it just kind of dawned on me. When you work hard you can play hard. The work is practice and how much you put into practice. Once you start giving everything in practice, the better and smarter you are in the game.

I use to work so hard in the weight room and every rep I did on each set was important. I saw so much improvement in my strength and my fitness. When football practice came around, well I mean nobody likes practice that much, just the games. So, I never really gave it my all. Then I started noticing something. I started making the same errors in practice that I did on the field. Until I started noticing them in both the game and practice, and only when I gave it my all is when I started to correct them.

When the games rolled around, is when I started getting better. Sure I make mistakes every now and then, but I don’t make them as often as I use to. This is what play hard really means. I played harder and better than before.

The harder I worked, the better I played. I started really reading the guards in practice and my other tools to find where the ball was going.  Then wouldn’t you know it, I started reading the guards better in the game to and fly to the ball. Well go to the ball faster then what I had before.

Work hard, play hard can really go with just about anything. When you’re in class or cooking or whatever you do. The harder you work at something, usually the harder you work at something else. You start expecting more out of yourself. When I went to the Shiloh seven on seven, we were visited by two NFL football players. One of them said something very important and it was this statement: “Do the best you can. If you are a garbage man, be the best garbage man you can be.”