Summer of 2018
Summer of 2018
The summer of 2018 was the most impactful summer of my life to this date.
As an athlete, I had never taken a summer off in my entire life. Every summer, it was traveling around every weekend for baseball tournaments. Between tournaments, summers consisted of being in the gym, in the cage, and later in life summer football practices. I never complained because it was what I wanted to do. I loved to train, and even more, I loved competing, and I still do.
This summer was so special because I could no longer do these things. That spring, I had completely broken my foot and had surgery to repair it. The expected recovery time was roughly six to eight weeks, but I was determined to make it back for spring football. Three weeks later, I was in full contact practice running, hitting, and jumping on my foot. Still, as one could expect, I quickly re-aggravated the injury. My doctor shut me down for the entire summer. Thus, I was no longer allowed to practice or play organized sports for liability reasons. I was forced to be stagnant for the summer.
With everything I had previously known about summer out of the window, I was forced to find other ways to spend the long, hot days in my small town. It would be here that I would discover new passions, past times, and friends.
The first part of this summer was spent on a three-week trip with my childhood friend McCain. The trip was to visit my mother in Jacksonville, Florida. During those three weeks, we explored the city, visited the beaches, and (against doctor's orders) played an unreal amount of pickup basketball with the locals. This was my first real independent experience outside of my hometown, and this was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life.
I also inherited one of the first real responsibilities of my life in 2018. I was gifted a dog, and she was a beautiful black, brown, and white Australian Shepard. Her name was Macie. Macie had one eye that was primarily brown with one spec of a beautiful wintery blue, and the other was the opposite. She was the most magnificent dog I had ever laid eyes on. Macie was special to me not for her beauty, though, but instead because she spent those days pent up in bed beside me while I recovered from my foot surgery. Sadly she is no longer with us, but in her short time on this Earth, she changed me as a man because she showed me that it is ok to hang out for a little while. She taught me to slow down and roll in the grass every once in a while.
I spent most of the time in the middle months of 2018 hanging out with my current best friends. Heath and Hunter are a few years older than I am, and in two months, I found two of my now closest friends. The two morphed into role models for me and are still today. During that period, we spent many days and nights on the water in our area, fishing and doing everything we wanted. That summer and those boys are what led me here to Williams Baptist. They were students here, and who else would I want to experience college with than my two closest friends?
Everyone has a few key moments or periods that they can look back on and think, "that is where my life changed," or "wow, this moment changed the way I look at things." This is just mine. Summer 2018 will go down as the summer that changed Tyler.
This is a picture I took one night in Jacksonville. This point of view is from the water level on the St. Johns River across from the Downtown Jacksonville area. Climbing down the embankment to get to this level was quite an experience!
Wassup Tyler, I really like how passionate and detailed you were in this blog. Good job on this!
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