Sin Letter

“Unsportsmanlike conduct. Number 60, Poland. 15 yard penalty”. Those words were all too familiar to me on the football field. I started playing football when I was just six years old in first grade. I have always been, as Dan Halloran would say, “a heavyweight” so I have played offensive and defensive line for the entirety of the eleven years I have played, but honestly I wouldn’t want to play any other position on the field. One thing that I am not necessarily proud of over the course of my football playing time, is that I have personally called for roughly 1,400 penalty yards of unsportsmanlike conduct.
I would like to say that I am a totally different person off of the football field. It’s kind of like when I step on the field, the well mannered and innocent Quinn decides to just hide somewhere, and then the mean, trash-talking, and unnecessarily rough Quinn decides to come play. I was always the kid that the other team’s parents would say rude things about such as, “Did you see that number 60? He was such a nasty little player. His coaches really aren’t teaching him well enough”, or my favorite saying, “That boy’s parents really ought to raise their kid better”.
I remember my first ever unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. It was my very first game of football, and I was playing for peewee league team in Auburn named the Vikings. We were playing a team from Dixfield and I vividly remember this because my cousin Cooper was on that team. He was also the kid that I eventually ended up fighting with during the game, and I was called for my very first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. My aunt even has a video of it and it is kind of funny to go back and watch six year old me wrestling my cousin (whom I am absolute best friends with now) during the middle of a football game. From that day game up until fifth grade, I would end up either saying something nasty in front of the refs or end up fighting with somebody once every few games. It was in fifth grade when my nastiness really picked up.
In fifth grade I stopped playing for Auburn and ended up playing for Poland instead. Ben English has some pretty good first hand experience in witnessing me getting called for flag after flag from fifth grade up until high school. Whether it was for fighting (which happened literally every game), holding, or trash-talking, I was somehow always getting penalized. The best examples of me being called for unsportsmanlike conduct is on kick return. This isn’t an exaggeration and isn’t made up either. There was a boy on our team named Mason and he would return the kicks for us. He was very fast and was a great football player. It just so happened that every single kick return that he had for a touchdown was called back because of me. It was always either because I felt the need to block the other kids until they were flat on their backs, or because I had taken a cheap shot on someone. It eventually came to the point in time where Mason would score and then he would be looking around for the yellow penalty flag. Later in my first year in high school was when I had a pretty rude wake up call.
I started varsity as a freshman in high school not because I was bigger and stronger than the others (which I definitely wasn’t), but because I was very smart when it came to football and I really knew what I was doing. I was actually about three inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than an average high school lineman my freshman year. I remember playing at Wells, Maine and I had been trash talking my opponent for most of the game. I’m not sure why I was doing this because he was much bigger and stronger than I was. Later on in that game my opponent decided to retaliate against me which I don’t blame him for. All I remember is running down field and trying to block for my running back, and then I remember waking up about thirty seconds after the play was over. If you haven’t already figured it out, I was hit pretty hard a knocked out cold by my opponent. That one play really made me realize that I probably shouldn’t be doing the things that I do or say during football games and that I had to at least cut back or become aware of how much I these things.
Now that I’m at Hebron, I am proud to say that I haven’t gotten into one single fight during a football game, mostly because I am aware that I would get kicked out of school for doing do. I may say some harsh things to other players every once in awhile, but honestly I don’t as much as I used to. Although I have a pretty extensive history of being unsportsmanlike during football, I’m really not proud of this at all. These things may make some pretty sweet stories, but I hope that eventually my unsportsmanlike-ness will come to an end.