Do guys do this????

M

Mrs.Macanudo

25+ Posts
When I was in highschool, there weren't many double/triple letter girls in various sports. I played junior olympic volleyball, tennis.....but I was best at fast pitch softball.

My daughters both have my arm
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But everytime I watch a softball game, (I was the fast pitcher....clocked at a little over 68 mph at age 12), I think....what if UT had a team (not just a club). I could have gone to UCLA. My parents and Mac prevented it.

It seems that guys still have more opportunities in general (maybe I am wrong)....but do most athletic guys go through life thinking....just what if?
 
I was in high school in the early 70's. Most sports were played by big, tough guys and the coaches focused on them rather than the smaller types like me.

I tried football and basketball, but the coaches thought I was too small. I played tennis instead, but it was considered a wimpy sport and the tennis coach was a greenhorn position at the school -- something new coaches had to do because they had no seniority. I was small, but I was fast and had quick reflexes. Without much of any coaching my teammate and I won district tennis and were stopped one win away from going to state.

The next year I came down with Hepatitis and was unable to play tennis that year, my senior year.

So yeah, guys have regrets. I could have tried harder in the sports I let go. I could have not gotten sick. I could have gone to school during a different time when smaller and faster players were not looked down upon so much. I could have had better coaches.
 
I think the original post is about wondering if you were good enough to make it to the upper levels of sports. My answer essentially was that, yes, we all do. I don't think Title IX really figures in all that much. It's all relative anyway.
 
I could have had track scholarship options at smaller (non SWC) schools and didn't think a second about it. Dream was always UT.
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I played one sport, football, and I was on the last string, whatever number that was. When I was put in during games, people started chanting "Rudy" (which is not really a compliment when it comes right down to it).


So no, I never really have those thoughts.
 
Thoughts like this in general, paths one might have taken other than actually taken, become less compelling as time goes by. Enjoy this type of thought for what it is, but the reality we have is worth no regrets.
 
Pros vs. Ho's


Coming this Fall on FX

hmmm... if I used a U instead of an O, that would change the whole meaning to a 3:16 type post....
 
I'm not sure if this applies to the OP, but, I too have regrets. My problem was that I was an extremely late bloomer. I was the shortest and lightest kid in 8th grade. I hit a growth spurt and blew up to 6 ft. but I only weighted about 140. Problem is that, even though I was on the baseball and basketball teams for a short while, I was nothing more than a backup to the backups. I therefore quit to get a job and start saving for Texas.

Now, I'm 6' and 190. I can ball -- it's just about 10 years too late.

I've heard similar stories to the crew one posted above. As a matter of fact, if I'm not mistaken, Tennessee has 14.5 scholarships to fill in crew. They pass out fliers and ask women to join.

Title IX is ********. Football should be taken out of the equation. At that point, you have a women's basketball team, you have a men's basketball team and so on.
 
I was one fo the best soccer players in Houston in the late 70's, only person to score an international goal in the area during that time frame on US shores that I was aware of. Soccer was a club sport, it became a letter sport the year after I graduated. Would have been easy for me to triple or quad letter as a junior. I didn't even pursue a soccer scholarship as I would ahve been looking at St Louis or the Virginia area in all liklihood. I don't really think "what if" because I know what if... but heck I could have blown a knee. And what if woudl have ended after college.

My Dad was a true what if, state record holder in backstoke in Florida for several years, got appendecitis a week and a half before the Olympic Trials. I have always admired him for not telling me how great he was and letting me go the path tham made me happy.

What is comic to me is the large number of men who honestly could not have held my jock strap telling their kids again and again how great they were in such and such... Sad to me, that they mask their own lack of achievement by embellishing to their children and putting additional pressure on them.

I tend to think of... what if my parents didn't expect me to get a good education and make a decent living... I could have been a ROCK STAR!
 
Oh geez....

I meant that I made a choice to stay close and that I really loved my boyfriend.

I knew I could go to other schools and Mac would never have said, "no".

My parents more than anything made me stay close. This is not bad....its just what happened.

Clocked at 68, actually. Yes, I was really good and had/ still kinda have, great arm. I had a hell of a curve ball, too.

Gave it up in Oak Ridge/The Woodlands because the other girls treated me like ****, and at the time....I thought I would never be respected, or most likely, never have a boyfriend if I kept playing the sport.

I won't go into this.....but Mac DID have a role in that. Ask him what he thought of female athletes by 1989. (or even more interesting, what his Dad thought....)

I was a setter in volleyball and had an offer to play both volleyball and tennis in Ohio. Not Ohio State....but still.

I would not change my life, Mac, or the baby M's for anything in the world.

Its just that sometimes I wonder. My best game....Lake Jackson at about 10 at night. Tournaments often ran over. We agreed to play late.

3 up three down for like 7 straight innings. Close to another no hitter, but my team couldn't field worth ****. Man, I couldn't throw anything but a strike that night. It was awesome.

I still remember the look on all the adults faces each half inning I walked off the field.

Ahhhh...sometimes its just nice to think about it.

And, for the record....Mac what ifs all the time.
 
yeah, I know, I was just poking at the two of you--hoping to stir up a domestic disturbance on Hornfans--my kind of fun.
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I do it a little bit, but not much. I was playing for a 2A private school and was pretty good at that level, but based on the few guys I played with/against that were small-college prospects, I didn't really think I had the slightest chance. But my jr. year my coach told me he thought I had a chance to play D3 or maybe D2, and layed out what he thought it would require of me above and beyond the required committment to sports to be on my HS team. I decided it wasn't worth it for just "a chance" that still might not come through no matter how hard I worked, especially since it would mean giving up a chance to go to UT or Rice and get a top-level engineering degree. So, sometimes I look back and say "Darn, playing in college would have been fun", but I've got my degree from UT now and I'm 100% sure I made the right choice.

In reply to:
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all the time..

when i was 12 i was 5'9" and about 140#.
i threw the baseball around 70mph.. i gave up 4 hits the entire local little league season and batted .700 or so.

in the 8th grade dist track meet i won the 100, 200, 400, long jump and got 3rd in the shot.
i long jumped 19'11". ran 11.30, 53.25, 24.25 and threw the shot 43'.

then i didnt grow any more.

god is mean.
 
my dad played baseball at iowa so it was always my dream to play ball in college. trained for it my whole life, but tryouts my freshman year (we had no fish team) it was about 100 kids looking for 5 spots. I didnt make it, although surprisingly enough a guy with a broken arm made it without even trying out (something about his dad being a VP for the spurs). From what I hear though he never actually played...

Anyway, sophomore year i tried again and was told i was good enough to play but the coach wanted freshman only to focus on the future (the same coach who got fired the next year).

So, I gave up on baseball and pursued distance running because I was already varsity my soph year. Went to state a couple times in XC, and my times in XC senior year were pretty good, and if i carried those into track i was sure to get at least a decent D2 scholarship/D1 walkon. But, strained hip flexor at the first meet sidelined me for my senior track season, thus no times to recuit off of, thus no recruiting. I could have walked on at a less prestigious running school, but then I wouldn't be at UT.

So, what if i hadn't gone to my high school and had been allowed to play ball? What if I had walked on at a slower running school? UT's been great, but I miss the competition of racing. C league softball just isn't quite the same...
 
Yeah, sometimes. I'm a good enough golfer now despite the fact that I was a varsity baseball player for 2.5 years at a 5A school. I'm pretty sure that, had I devoted those four years to golf instead of baseball, that I could have played D1 golf somewhere. Not OkSt / AzSt D1, or even Texas (at the time) D1, but a Baylor or a TCU or something, surely. Three of the top 5 our senior year went D1 (Tech, DePaul and UH I think), and they missed winning state because they couldn't get a consistent 4th player in the 70's every week. Had I played, I'm almost positive that we'd have won our senior year, and probably our junior year (hell, I shot 77 at Kizer the day of the women's state final from the back tees, and that was DURING baseball season).

But man, I had a blast playing baseball
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On a side note....
My Grandpa played for Nebraska and then in the minors for a while.

He gave me his bat. I had him sign it (Love, Grandpa) and its hanging in our living room. It killed my Grandma (my two male cousins were her favorite on my Mom's side) that he gave it to me instead of the boys.

I think that actually tickled my Grandpa to death.

If it had been a full ride to UCLA instead of partial....I probably would have gone there...even though I can't stand California.

Okay, that was a good enough walk down memory lane....

Time to get some work done.

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I what if'd many times over the years, I had the size to be a good football player but no real drive to do it. Football ended for me after my Frosh year. I ended up becoming a D&D playing ROTC Nazi in High School, and was constantly picked at.

That all changed at my 10 year HS reunion. I showed up, relatively well dressed. No college degree, but a 60k/year job with a great career path, and an awesome wife and kid. In walk some of the former jocks that constantly picked at me, wearing jorts and their HS Football t-shirts, trying to live in the past.

I've never looked back since.
 
At the end of HS I had the game to play golf for a DII college team, but I didn't want to go to a small school in the middle of nowhere, and I wanted to be an architect, which only the big state schools offered. I abandoned my dream of the US Open to go to Tech...some of you might call it a small school in the middle of nowhere
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...but now I am on a great career path and, to be honest, I enjoy golf now far more as an occasionally-playing 6 handicapper than I did as a scratch player devoting most of my extra time to practicing. So I don't really have regrets, although sometimes I still dream of getting dedicated again and qualifying for the US Open.
 
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