{"id":35604,"date":"2022-07-02T08:17:42","date_gmt":"2022-07-02T12:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/?p=35604"},"modified":"2022-07-02T08:17:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-02T12:17:42","slug":"why-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/why-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Not?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s 8am. It’s 95 degrees. Maybe 100 degrees on an artificial turf field. You have a full sweat going. Your legs are cramping. Your heart is POUNDING through your chest. WHO DOES THIS TO THEMSELVES?! Why not dream BIG!!??? I mean… Haven’t you been putting in the work? Haven’t you been SWEATING while others were sleeping? Haven’t you spent countless HOURS working on your craft?<\/p>\n

Often as adults, we get to a point in life where we stop dreaming. We stop reaching. We stop going for what we really wanted, and settle for what we know we can safely reach. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, as it’s normally related to our responsibilities. You can’t be a kid forever. But our KIDS are STILL KIDS!! Let them dream.<\/p>\n

There are far too many adults LIVING for the opportunity to destroy the dreams of young athletes. I used to be one of them. “You know you can’t play at that level! Why don’t you be more realistic?”<\/p>\n

There’s nothing wrong with being honest with a kid, it’s actually NEEDED. However, you need to remember you were once their age and had insane dreams of what you wanted to be. It hit me like a ton of bricks one day while talking to a young man about his athletic future. The goal of where he wanted to play in college was TOTALLY UNREALISTIC. But instead of destroying him, I looked internally. I too have some unrealistic goals that I’ve been keeping a secret. And I realized I’ve been keeping it a secret because I was kinda afraid to put it out there and then fail. BUT I sucked it up and challenged this young man with unrealistic goals, and I told him MY unrealistic goals, and said we’re going to do it together!<\/p>\n

So what if we don’t make? If we don’t, then we’ll continue our extremely blessed lives already in progress! We will still be completely fine, but WE will know! WE will know if we could or could not make it happen. I can live with that.<\/p>\n

Now to all of the adults who will say this is crazy to tell a kid, I actually did give this young man all of the pros and cons, consequences and repercussions, and the realistic view of where he is ACTUALLY at right now. But I still challenged him to shoot as high as possible. Like my favorite rapper J. Cole says, “If you didn’t aim to high… You aimed too low.”<\/p>\n

-Rok<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35605,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[386],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-photo-of-the-week"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/rokballer.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/2022-06-30-ecs-football-conditioning-5571.jpg?fit=1280%2C1600&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35604"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35607,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35604\/revisions\/35607"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rokballer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}