Trouble at School - by Dad

I can’t think of anything that I got in trouble for that put me in a good light like your mothers’ story. I can tell you my experience trying out for 8^th grade football. As I recall, my folks discouraged me and didn’t really think I needed to play football. I knew exactly nothing about football at the time except it was the cool thing to play sports. The coach was a friend of my dads’, Dell Wallengren, who was also my 8^th grade math teacher. His wife actually was a writer and later went on to write for tv shows, in fact I just looked her up on Wikipedia, Orma Wallengren, and she wrote the script for Jonny Lingo . Anyway, I knew none of this in the 8^th grade and Dell was just the 8^th grade football coach. So I went and picked up my gear, actually I think it was the 3^rd practice or so, and I dressed and went onto the field and became a halfback. Well, I knew nothing about the plays cause I had missed the first two practices, but I stood in place and when the ball was hiked, the QB handed it off to me. Whoa, what am I going to do with this ball. Everyone pounced on me because I just stood there with the ball. The coach came over and told me to go learn the plays. Well, I was so embarrassed I didn’t really want to learn the plays or to expose myself to more embarrassment. So I just left the field, went to the dressing room and took off my equipment, checked it all back in, and thought “maybe tennis”. As it turns out, pep band was the closest I got to playing football during my junior and senior high school. If there had only been a cycling team!