Keep Shooting For Your Dreams

Cutter's Log - Stardate 2102.82.10
Current Song - Endgame (REM)

Many years ago I was thinking to myself what would life be like if I hadn't moved from Rock Falls to Sterling back in the spring of '97. Surely life would have been different. But the sticking point of all of that was, what would life be in regards to having friends, happiness, and my biggest worry at the time - having a girlfriend.

Once more I thought of an alternate reality, but not that of staying in RF.

I've had a lot to think about over the past couple of days. But just now, as I was wandering down a thought pattern, I found myself wondering what my life would be like without high school sports.

Nothing.

If, for some reason, my interest in high school sports was yanked from me, I would find myself alone, empty, disappointed, sad, lonely - and even more than what I am now.

Throughout high school, I wasn't able to build onto anything that I could use in the future. This includes school friends. Somehow when I tried, it was recieved very badly.

I became lonely and sullen throughout high school. Just when my world was collapsing around me, that's when I found the love for high school sports. I took it, embraced it, and stated that from that day forward I would never let it go.

If I let go of my love for high school sports, my dreams would be shattered and I don't think I'd have anything to live for. I mean, I went to college and spent five years of my life working on a mass communnication degree. If all of it was thrown away, all that time would have been a waste.

Quite often I've found myself staring death of my career and my love for high school ports at its face. Every time I've found myself in that position, I have said "No."

Personally, I have been torn apart and beaten to a bloody pulp because I simply do not want to throw away my career as a high school sports journalist.

I've made a lot of sacrifices - especially time and money - just to keep my career ambitions afloat.

I've seen my finances dwindle to the nothing that it is today. I've slept in my own cold car at state tournament games just to preserve the money I have to keep prodding on. I've starved myself to death at long marathon sports sessions just to try to keep the money afloat. Who knows what other sacrifices I have made, and they probably do not exist in my head because it has become so routine.

When I look past that face of the death of my career and my love for high school ports, I see the same nothing that I was before I fell in love with it. Life's necessities kept pushing me toward death's face. But each time I turned around and kept fighting.

High school sports and journalism is my life. I'd be a shell of my former self without it, and I don't want that happening to me.

A couple of years ago - after a few years of not going anywhere with friendships I hade tried to forge throughout school days - I wanted to try to get somewhere with friendships that fell under the same general interest of mine (high school sports). These few years were those that I literally had no support group around me. Over the past couple of years, I am trying to rebuild it through the interest of high school sports.

My presence as a journalist gave me unlimited boundaries as far as having access to people. My duty as a journalist gave me the power to interact with others - a power that I never really had during school days.

Through my love for high school sports and journalism I have met so many people from so many schools. I wanted to not just be that journalist, but I wanted to strive to be a friend and a person that can be accessible when it came to wondering what high school sports is truly like.

In the past decade of covering high school sports - and this may seem like bragging, but I think it's true - I have seen everything. I have seen every sport on every level. Big school, small school. Public school, private school. Starters and scrubs. Suburban school and poor school. All through almost every perspective imaginable.

Interview subjects, I don't feel, are simply interview subjects. That would be the slightest bit of rudeness in a way. Coaches, players, athletic directors, officials, fellow members of the high school sports media world and the like: I want to be their friend.

I feel like I have established that circle of friendship very well. And I am going to keep soldiering on with my dreams of becoming the best high school sports journalist I can be, and with the support of the people that I am around.

And to throw it all away would literally, and truthfully, be the end of one Cody Cutter.