Good morning.
I’ve been thinking about the rookies showing up to their first NFL minicamps this month — kids from small towns in Alabama, Ohio, rural Texas, places where the Friday night lights were the biggest stage they’d ever known. And now they’re walking into an NFL facility, learning the playbook, trying to figure out how to belong in a room they’ve dreamed about their whole lives.
Nobody tells you how disorienting it is when the dream actually starts.
I grew up somewhere small. Not geographically remote, but small in the way that matters — small in ambition, small in what people around me believed was possible, small in the language available for what I was trying to become. There wasn’t a word for what I wanted to do. There wasn’t a blueprint. There definitely wasn’t a room full of people who looked like me doing it.
And here’s what I know now that I wish someone had told me then: being small-town with big ambitions is not a disadvantage. It’s a specific kind of fuel.
You don’t take things for granted. You work like access can disappear because you remember when it wasn’t there. You’re not bored by the basics — you actually appreciate what the people who grew up with it have stopped noticing. You carry a hunger that looks like chip-on-the-shoulder from the outside and feels like clarity from the inside.
The NFL schedule releases in May, and every team in every city — the small markets and the big ones — gets the same number of games. The playing field doesn’t care where you came from. It cares what you do once you get there.
Where you started is not a ceiling. It’s a starting line.
And some of us run faster because of it.
Good morning. Drink your coffee. Go build something they’ll talk about.
Leave a Reply