Orphan Turned Sports Fanatic
How many people do you think can say they've made the journey from an orphanage in Russia to an officer in the US Air Force, and more importantly, a sports fanatic? My guess is, not many. The purpose of this post is to briefly detail my journey from Russia to where I am now and to lay the groundwork for future articles (Spoiler: I'll be writing about sports).
I was born in Russia and adopted by an American family when I was two years old. There is no explanation for why I was chosen to live a brand new life other than to say it was simply the grace of God. I have minimal recollection of my earlier years but what I do know is that I started loving sports at a very young age. I'm not sure what the allure was at the time, my guess is that I just had infinite amounts of energy growing up and the only way to tire myself out was to run around outside. The first sports related memory I have comes from my career as a professional little league teeball player. I was probably 5 or 6 at the time and I remember one at bat in particular. I stepped into the batters box, tapped the plate with my bat, and stared the pitcher right in the eyes in hopes of intimidating him. The umpire yelled "play ball" and i began my swing and crushed the stationary ball off the tee. Pretty sure the ball soared all the way to the left field fence before anyone knew what had happened. A few years after that, sports had developed into a priority for me. I lived and breathed sports. Every waking moment I was either watching sports on TV, collecting sports cards, or outside playing sports. Around this time I realized I needed some favorite teams to cheer for so I started doing some research. The choices were pretty easy, My dad went to the University of Florida and lived up north so I wanted to cheer for the Gators and Red Sox. In addition to that I grew up in Jacksonville so i rooted for the Jaguars. To this day I still root for all three of those teams and have even picked up the Dolphins as an alternate NFL team to root for. Some years are painful because nothing's worse than a losing season from your favorite teams but nothing will ever top watching the Gators and Red Sox both bringing home some hardware from 2004-2008.
Fast forwarding a little bit now to present time. I'm 22 and currently working for the Air Force as a Combat Systems Officer but sports will always dominate my life which brings us here. My personal dream in life is to be an NFL scout for the Jaguars or any other NFL team really. Is this a realistic dream? Who knows. Either way, writing about sports seemed like an interesting hobby to take up now that football season is over. I don't have much free time on my hands but my hope is to type of some articles on the weekends. I will spend most of my time evaluating the Gators, Jags, Dolphins and Red Sox but will mention other teams as well from time to time. If i'm lucky i'll pump out an article or two every month, or maybe ill never write another one. So I guess you just have to follow me and find out what's next.