For me, the hardest part of the freshman football experience were the different "plays". They were something I was never able to keep straight in my head. Early on in our training, we were each handed a “playbook”, which was a many-paged mimeographed series of diagrams, made up of circles and arrows. Each play was named and identified by a series numbers that we were supposed to memorize.
I was never very good at remembering gibberish, random numbers, or letters, and looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that hearing the quarterback spout out a series of numbers didn’t translate into anything meaningful in my befuddled brain.
Listening to the numbers of a play supposedly told everyone where they were supposed to run and what they were supposed to do, but it just always left me very insecure, because I didn’t know what the series of numbers meant for me to do
I have always been more visually oriented in everything. Before each play, what I really needed were the diagrams that I could see. When we played neighborhood football at Neal’s, we would kneel down, then using a stick we would sketch out in the dirt what we were going to do, like a marking the play on a chalk board. When everyone had the play, we would rub out the drawing in the dirt, so that the other team wouldn't see it (not that they ever could). Sometimes we would go really high tech, and instead of using the dirt, we would just sort of draw out the play with our finger, on the palm of our hand.
However with these high school numbered plays, I was having a terrible time converting the numbers into actions, and it didn't help my situation any, when they repeatedly changed which position I was going to play. Because I could run, I was usually put, playing one of the back field positions, but then would suddenly switch me over and make rattled off a bunch of numbers anyway.
Tomorrow: What will I do when I was taken off the bench and put in a game?
You can see my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
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