Not Without Hope Read Online Free

bread crumbs. We loved it.
    Will was a starter in 2006, his senior year. I was a junior, but my career ended before it began. The first week of the season I was inactive because I had an incomplete grade. The second week I was getting ready to run out of the tunnel with my uniform on when I got stopped. I literally had to take my pads off while everyone ran onto the field. I hadn’t been cleared to play by the N.C.A.A. I was heartbroken. My family was there. They were so proud of me, and now I wouldn’t get a chance to play. I was so embarrassed. I wanted to cry and kill someone at the same time.
    Halfway through the next week, they told me I would have to sit out the entire 2006 season. Even though I had never played college football, I was ineligible for a year because I had transferred from Kent State. The coaches tried to see what they could do, but it was out of their hands. Why the school waited so long to tell me this, I don’t know. I had been on the team since the previous February, and there had been talk of a possible scholarship. Now I had to wait a whole year. I guess that’s what you get for being awalk-on. I stuck it out the next couple of weeks, practicing with the scout team, but you get treated like garbage when you’re not eligible. I just couldn’t do it. I decided to hang up my pads. I would have had one year of eligibility remaining in 2007, but I couldn’t wait that long. It was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make. I had trained six hours a day to make that team. When they told me I’d have to sit out a year, it felt almost as bad as season-ending surgery. That was tough. By now, the majority of my friends were on the team. They were busy playing ball, and I wasn’t. It was kind of awkward. I distanced myself from them and just lay low.
    I gave football one more shot in October 2008, as I was finishing my last semester at USF. This time I tried out for the Tampa Bay Storm, an indoor professional team in the Arena Football League. I quit drinking for four months, cut weight, and worked out ten times a week, lifting weights in the day and doing drills at night. I got down to 233 pounds, 6 percent body fat—real lean. In the end, that hurt me. I was among the top three fastest of the three hundred people who tried out, but I was underweight. They wanted guys who were 265, 270, to play both linebacker and full-back. It was frustrating, but in the end, I guess it wasn’t meant to be—the whole league folded.
    At the time, I was in about the best shape I’ve ever been in prior to training with Marquis and Corey. I really loved being a fitness trainer. Working out and lifting weights for me creates a way to relieve stress. I hold a lot of stuff inside, and this is a way to burn off my anxiety. Working out clears my mind, kind of levels me off. Some people enjoy shopping or have a drink or eat food for comfort. I enjoy working out. And I like working with other people. I’m hands-on in that way. One of the best feelings is seeing a person reach his or her goal, getting stronger, losing weight, feeling more self-confident.
    Will didn’t lift weights as much as he once did, but he still swam at a YMCA for an hour three times a week. We grew closer after he graduated from USF. He was from Crystal River, Florida, a small town of about 3,500 people located about an hour north of Tampa. It’s on Kings Bay, which is spring-fed so that its temperature remains constant through the year. During the winter, nearly 400 manatees gather in the temperate waters. His parents lived on a channel. He loved to fish and was big into camping. In high school, he and his friends used to go on all-night shark fishing trips just off the coast. We played golf together, though he was much better than I was. If that wasn’t bad enough, he deliberately refused to help me improve.
    I would ask him, “Okay, seriously, how do I get better?”
    “Stop sucking,” he would say.
    “How do I stop sucking?”
    “Hit