My name is Hercules and this is my journey to the NFL (Intro/Part 1)

Hello fellow steemers! My brother has been a member of this community for about a month now and has told me a lot about it and the interesting things going on with Steem. He encouraged me to share my story and so here I am to tell you all about myself and my journey to become a professional football player. 

My real given name is Trevor, but my middle name is Irakli (Greek for Hercules). My father wanted to name me Hercules but my mom insisted on Trevor (mostly for the sake of me not being made fun of constantly in school). You see, my family has ties to Greece, Turkey, and Italy, but my father was actually born in Kenya (Mombasa to be specific). I was raised heavily on Greek and African traditions and taught a lot about those cultures. Yet, from a young age i became fascinated with football. I started playing in local youth leagues at 8 years old. In my senior year of high school, my finger split open during practice one day early in the season and wasn't able to play (and accumulate film for colleges). 

After High School, I started what I would later know to be a countrywide journey of moving from school to school. I started out at Mount Union College (they win the Div 3 title every year basically in CF) and during my year there we won a title but I left after 1 year and transferred to Central Lakes College (a JUCO) in Minnesota. Growing up in Florida, obviously we don't deal with cold weather all that much....so spending winters near the Canadian border were definitely interesting. I would walk to school every day,(it was a pretty short distance) sometimes in multiple feet of snow. At some point, a neighbor from the community offered to lend me his snowmobile so I could go to Walmart or Subway to buy food since I didn't have a car. Even with all the weather challenges and being so far from home, I had a breakout year, easily the best of my football career thus far. By the end of the season, I ranked first among TE's in receptions and receiving yards for all of the JUCOs in the US. I got a couple offers to play at Georgia State and Chattanooga, but declined to join Charleston Southern. They were offering me kind of a walk-on scholarship and that upcoming year they had several D1 opponents on the schedule, including the Florida Gators and University of Miami. I grew up wanting to play football for the Gators and i really wanted to play in the 'Swamp' against Tebow, so for that reason and many others I agreed to go to South Carolina. My grades weren't up to par though, so I had to go to stay home and go to community college before i could enroll at Charleston Southern. I spent the summer of 2009 going to school to get my grades up, and one night during that summer while playing basketball recreationally, I felt my knee buckle and was immediately worried. I then went to a doctor who was a former athletic specialist at FAU in Boca Raton and told me that my knee was alright and would just require some rest. I left the office relieved and several months later I was on my way to Charleston.

                                                                          

                                                                 During a Central Lakes game in Minnesota

My mom and I drove 10 hours up to the campus and not even 15 minutes after she dropped me off and heading back down to Florida, I got a phone call. It was my mom. She told me that the doctor who looked over my knee had called her to tell us that he made a mistake reading the wrong X-ray and that I did in fact have a torn ACL and meniscus. To say I was distraught would be putting it mildly. I instantly got on a plane and went home to have immediate surgery to repair the ACL (by the same doctor, i know probably not my best idea). Right after the surgery I wanted to get back to the team immediately and do my rehab up there rather than down in Florida. Up until this point, I still hadn't checked into my dorm or with anyone from the school or football team. In fact, there was only one coach from Charleston Southern who i was in contact with (the guy that recruited me) so no one else on the staff really even knew me. Upon my arrival back to CSU post-ACL surgery, i ran into the coach who recruited me who told me that he was taking a job elsewhere and then just left me with a "good luck". I was a stranger in a new town, planning to play on a team where none of the coaches even knew me, and now I was injured on top of it. 

The year I spent at CSU was miserable. I was doing rehab across the street (not with the team) and i spent a large amount of time there basically invisible. Once I got cleared to start running, I got in touch with the coaches and they agreed to let me join the team for optional summer workouts. When i started attending those in the summer, there was only 6 or 7 people that would show up for the 5 am workouts each day. I never missed a day. Later in the summer, when the rest of the team arrived, the coaches introduced me to everyone and for the first time since my arrival, I felt a part of the organization. Shortly after that, I finally got officially cleared and given my pads. We were just about to start full practices for the upcoming season and I was still doing my rehab (albeit the later stages of it). I had been running and participating in drills and workouts, but wasn't 100% in terms of football capacity. There was a lot of back and forth between myself, one of the trainers, and the head coach. I told the trainer I felt like I need a knee brace temporarily, but he refused and said Id be fine without one. I took the issue up with the head coach, who quickly referred me back to the trainer. In the end, I wasn't given one and on the 3rd day of practice, a D-End hit me right on my knee during a full pad drill and I re-injured my knee. I felt a mixture of many types of emotions: anger, frustration, helplessness, and sadness. The coaches ended up red-shirting me and just like that, the season for me was over.  

PART 2 COMING UP SOON!!!!!