God I miss the competition. Just SOME of my highlights from a couple years ago. I was a 2X State Champion. I never reached my full potential due to money reasons.
You know it’s interesting that when you are young you notice signs of struggle your parents are going through. I remember noticing before 2008-2009, my parents were struggling to support the family. Always stressed about money. Always have so many things going on. A job, athletic kids running around going to tournaments, track meets, football games. It gets expensive.
I’ll never forget getting stressed out myself for my parents. Gas prices were soaring in the 4 dollar mark. In california, one state over, it was flirting with 6 dollars a gallon. It was nuts. Living outside city limits got expensive driving to work everyday. It’s was expensive to go watch their kids compete in sports, let alone pay your way outside of the school year, joining club athletic teams where you have to pay your way to compete. Not only that but my parents worried about Food. Mortgage. Utilities. Life is expensive.
I couldn’t afford to go to college. I couldn’t do that to my parents. They were on board and said they would find a way. On my conscience, I just couldn’t do that to them. What if I got hurt in college and lost any scholarship money I had? I didn’t want to go into debt myself, and I love my parents too. They worked hard. Really hard. Not only that, my brother went off to college before me and played two years of college football. Guess what? He got screwed by the education system logging him in the wrong classes, but was told to attend X classes. He went. He has really good grades. Until one day the professor noticed something odd. He wasn’t even attending the right classes. How was he getting graded in classes he wasn’t enrolled for? And guess what!? He still had to pay for the classes he was attending, or getting graded in? How did the school system not call him in and say hey, what’s going on? That right there would have fixed the problem. He could have started going to the right classes and fixed what was going on. I lost faith in the system.
It’s nuts the world puts SOO much trust in the education, and government system. And when the system screws up, it’s always your fault (which it is in some degree) but they never take ownership and fix their own mistakes either. This is part of the reason why I love cryptocurrency so much.