Cowboys!

For my internship I have taken on the role of assistant coach at Livermore Highschool in my home town.  This may seem like an odd internship to take however I have done more for this team in the last 3 months than I have for any class or job I have had so far.  We practiced all summer from 3-7 every day and twice a day for one week of double days.  Now that the season has started we are currently practicing 4 days a week with a game on Friday nights followed by Saturday morning film review of the previous nights game.  I am learning a lot about leadership roles not only among coaches but among teammates as well.  We have to stay organized and on schedule every day or we will not finish our practice plans for the day.  We create practice plans for each day of the week on Saturdays so that we can fully prepare for the opponents offense and defense for the coming week. For each segment of practice we have broken everything down into timed sessions of a given exercise to make sure we teach the kids what they will see from their opponents.

Through this experience so far I have found that coaching is not all about the sport necessarily. I'm not going to lie and say that winning is un-important because it is, but what i will say is we are not there to win. We are there to create young men. Men with character who we as coaches can be proud of.  We have kids from all different groups at school, some who are failing classes, others who have been in trouble with the police but the thing that brings all of these kids together is football.  These kids cannot play if they do not make a GPA of at least a 2.0 (which shouldn't be very hard, yet we have knuckle heads who seem to fail to meet this goal) in which the consequence is to be ejected from the team. If a student misbehaves inside or outside of school we as a team vote on the consequential action and can result in game suspensions or ejection from the team. This may not seem like a harsh punishment, but the effect is one of the strongest motivators i have seen.  When you become brothers with the man next to you failing them is worse than failing yourself, and this lone fact has pushed our student athletes to pick each other up and make each other better people.

As far as my relation to this internship and my art I have found ways to incorporate more than a few things.  As character building our head coach has had the students re-paint the locker room, snack shack, and press box.  As coaches we helped the Sr. Students paint and stencil each building with the cowboy insignia as well as "Livermore Cowboys" or "Cowboy Pride."  On a personal level i have created designs for the cowboys football team in order to give out t shirts for Cowboy of the week, and other special occasions.  I would also like to make custom sweatshirts in which they have a design of my making on them accompanied with the players number on the back and last name.  These sweatshirts would be pre-ordered and all benefits would go to the Livermore Cowboy football program and would be sold at the homecoming game. This event would be my largest endeavor for the team and would take some time to get approved, organised, and executed properly.