Last time we were together, I said I would talk about my upcoming track season. The season track has officially kicked off and it is off to a great blast. We have had a total of three different track meets, with one of them being our senior night. Senior night was a very emotional night for me more than some others. I lost my mom over two years ago to cancer. Not having her walk with me that night hurt just a little extra that night, because every of the other seniors were walking with their mom and dads.

One of the other track meets we had was just yesterday. We ended up winning the meet as a team, but my solo performance was not good at all. Track meets are more of a way that I love to socialize with other people from other schools and trying to find some people who I might meet in some later years in college. I also love track meets because sometimes the school that we are at has some of the best food at the concession stand. The personal best food I have had this year at a track meet, was some pizza off a wood oven that was absolutely gas. The track season still has about a month and a half left, but it will take us till after graduation to end. I have some very high expectations for this team this year. We have some great potential and just some of the same pure talent that we had last year.

With graduation coming ever so soon, this will be the last post of the year for my blog. I have loved taking the time to talk with all of you about my great last year. This has been a very bittersweet year with so many ups and downs. I thank all of you for coming with me on this crazy journey. I hope that if I ever decide to revive this blog sometime in the future that some of you will come back to join me for part 2 of my story.

With all of that being said this year has been amazing and thank you guys again for joining me. I hope all of you have enjoyed the blog and I hope all of you enjoy your summers. Graduation is less than a month away for me so I will not be continuing this blog for at least quite some time. Thank you for joining me it has been real. Till next time, signing off from Stan the man.

Hey there I know I said I was going to be talking about track, but track season is still 15 days away from starting. With that being said, we will talk about the great three day weekend that I recently had.

It all started on Friday. I still had school so I had to attend those matters first before I even thought about having any fun at all. After school finally was out, I went home and realized nobody was home. My grandparents were out for the day and not returning till late and my brother was at my dads for the weekend. That means I was left to make food for myself and survive on my own for the night. I did the most logical thing anyone would do, I went out and got McDonald’s for dinner that night. After my dinner I met up with a friend. We drove around the country and went shopping at the local Walmart. I dropped them off shortly after and went home for the night and was asleep before my grandparents got back home.

Saturday started off hot as soon as I woke up. I had a text from one of my friends saying that we had brunch at his house at 10:45, the time I had woken up was 10:30. After rushing to get dressed and to his house, we enjoyed a great feast of pancakes, bacon, and eggs. Continuing my great day I went out of town to do some shopping. Remembering I had work at 3, I was forced to cut my shopping trip short luckily I had all my clothes in my car so I was able to just arrive and change in my car. Work was boring I just ran the register the whole time. After work I decided to call it in for the night and go home early instead of going out since I had been up all day.

Sunday was probably the worst day of it all. I had to work on Superbowl Sunday. This just sucked because since we did not have school in the morning, I was able to go to a Superbowl party. Instead I had my grandpa texting every time the score changed or something huge happened in the game. I got off and home just in time to see the game winning field goal get kicked and that was all I got to watch of the Superbowl.

Monday, however was not boring at all. Monday was the best part of the three day weekend. The golf team was finally getting back together to go out and get dinner tonight. We had been planning it all week so we were all pretty hype and excited. We all met at Collin’s house and left there. We arrived at the great Taco Bell!!!!! All of us easily spent $15 or more just on food and sweets and drinks. We all were very stuffed at the end though. We ended up almost getting run off the interstate a few times on the way home, but that is really what made the trip so fun and exciting.

Hopefully next time I can make a post track season will have started and I will be able to tell you some first thoughts on the team and how we look as a whole.

As all of you know I have been talking about my golf team and how we did as a team over the whole entire course of our season. Well I also am involved in the great running sport called track. The track season is coming up for me and my school. I love track mainly because of the coaches we have. Our coaches are some of just the most fun people to be around, and the team itself is one of the most well bonded things you will ever see.

I will be honest I am not the greatest track athlete but I am average to say the least. I run in the 4×200 relay and also throw the discus and shot-put. Last year I had a blast because we got new members that should have been doing track since their freshman year. My relay team was one to remember for a long time. We won about a total of 1 race and that was not even in the fastest heat. We were filled with injuries like no other team though. We lost our best sprinter at the beginning of the year and that was a huge blow. With all of our set backs we only got last a total of 2 times last year so we were very happy.

This year we are coming into the season looking like an absolute unit of a track team which is really good. Our long distance side is questionable this year considering we lost some huge talent in some athletes, but we still will be able to compete. I am excited to say the least about this year. I hope all of you will stay with me on this journey now. Until next time have a great day.

The last time I wrote to all of you I explained how I thought my break was going to go. I can say for the most part I got that all right on the dot with almost getting everything right about what I did. There were a few things though that happened that I never thought I would do.

To start my break we went straight to work like I said I was going to. I worked almost every single day. I had a total of 4 days off the whole break and when I say the money came like water-flow. I worked both holiday eves and both holidays over the break. The money and work has never been better than how it was over break. My job also held a secret Santa, which was the best part about the job. My secret Santa got me candy and then a gift card to the great Bass Pro. I got my person, who was one of my managers, a set of knives and a cheeseboard.

Besides working away my break like the slave to Walgreens I am. I also enjoyed the time I got to spend with friends. I got closer with one of the people I call a dawg now. I only basically spent my days with him whether it was before I would go to work, while I was on lunch at work, or when I was off work I was with him doing whatever the day had for us. Also during this time I was the one who took him to the airport at 1 in the morning, after he had already missed his first one earlier that day.

Overall I can say my break never had a boring day. If I could I would want every month this year to be like this past one. I never even had bad days really the break was drama free and then at the same time I was able to have a blast and enjoy it. I would say defiantly a ten out of ten would repeat again.

Over the past posts I have been talking about my family that I call the golf team. Well this week we are going to take a break from talking about the golf team and I will be talking about what I am going to be doing over the Christmas season break.

To start I am going to be working like an absolute dog at my local Walgreens. This is my 2nd ever high school job and I enjoy it quite well. This is because I am able to just talk to everyone, which is one of my favorite things to do. I enjoy every part of my job because there is really nothing hard about it. I just have to run the front cash register anytime I have a customer and if I do not have anyone then I just watch to see if anyone goes up there and I just walk around and make sure all the shelves are stocked and looking nice. This is a fun job and I do really enjoy it.

I also am going to be spending a lot of time with friends doing the wild stuff we do. I can say for a fact that anytime will not be a dull time at all and we will have some of the best times. We talked about going out on a big day trip and it seems like we all are on board for that plan so only time will tell with what happens that day.

The last thing that I will probably do that is worth talking about is go on a small trip with my grandparents. They always plan something small like a 3 day trip to somewhere in a neighboring state to us. That will be an adventure as they always are.

This break will deferentially not be something that I am going to be bored of so that is a great because I always love having something to do so I am ready and excited.

After weeks 7am practices and 6am bus rides throughout the season we had come to the last match that we would play. Our question we asked ourselves as a team could we do this and would all of our practice pay off? We were coming to our regional match of the year. We had played this certain course one time earlier, but it did not go well for any of us that time. This time was no different for us but we did play better if you would want to even say that.

A regional is a different type of match because you do not all start at the same time and finish at the same time. You get a set start time and you have to be at the tee box at least 5 minutes early or you will be penalized 3 strokes. So we got to the match and all of us got our tee times and then hit the range and putting greens. Slowly one by one all of us went and teed off and set start for the day.

I personally was having a great day out on the course I started off hot and went par, par, par. The front 9 for me was great I was sitting at 9th individually which meant if I kept that same play up I would have a chance to move on. The back 9 however had different plans for me. After my first three holes I went from 9th all the way down to 30th and I never recovered from that terrible start to an end.

After we had all finished we realized that we had all just played just as bad as last time and not a single one of us even had anything to say about the match. We finished last as a team in our regional and trust me when I tell you that feeling is probably the worst feeling just going home knowing you were the worst in what you worked so hard to compete in.

Later on in the year though we had a great last team meal. We had our golf banquet at one of our local banquet halls and we had some pizza and some great wings from a local restaurant. We went over the teams big goals and achievements throughout the season and before you knew it we had almost finished everything. Then coach got to the big part of team MVP. He gave a good speech about a player that had been a leader on and off the course a team player who would always do the talking for everyone. He called up my name to be named team MVP. I had felt so happy and proud that I had got this goal completed finally to have my own big MVP award. Now that I had finally put that dream to rest I was able to walk away from the sport of golf for the season but I can not wait for spring to get here now.

Last time you joined me as I talked about my team’s performance in one of our tournaments. We ended up getting 4th place and we felt good about ourselves as a team for once in the season. That feeling was very short lived as after the weekend ended we had our Apollo Conference Invitational.

The day started off rough for all of us because we all had to be awake dressed and at the school for our bus at 5:45 in the morning. We all looked deader than disco with the lack of sleep all of us got the night before. Coach did not help our case either as he ended up being close to 30 minutes late to get us. We all ended up taking a nap while we took our two hour trip up to our certain demise.

We arrived in the town hosting the invitational and got breakfast at the most exquisite place in all of America, the local McDonald’s. After our breakfast of champions we went to the course and got ready to play the absolute worst golf match of our careers. My round started okay and I thought I was gonna have a good day, but that was the farthest from what actually happened. My first three holes went par, par, bogey, and those were the best three holes of the day as the rest of my day went straight downhill. The rest of the team did not do well either and our coach did not even speak to us after the match we just loaded up the bus and left.

Even though we did terrible and had our worst team score of the year at a 396, we still did not get last place. Taylorville happened to shoot a 463 and made us look at least somewhat decent. Mahomet ended up winning the whole thing with a 321 as a total team score. Overall we were very disappointed leaving the golf course that day. We knew we could have done so much better as a team and truly we knew that we had let not only our coach down, but we let ourselves down with how poor we played that day. We learned from that though and made a goal to make sure that does not happen ever again.

After that finish we stepped up in every aspect of practice and we were determined to make sure that when our regional came that we would be able to do better than that terrible conference meet. The real question that we asked ourselves was, “Will this practice pay off or are we gonna wash up again?”

Recently I talked about our golf teams performance at our Lincoln Scramble tournament. This week I will be talking about another tournament that the boys and I did a lot better.

We knew going into this tournament that we had to play at our best to even have a chance at placing since there was such a tough field. We had been practicing for this tournament the whole week and now it was time to go out and show that this practice was not a waste of our time. A little information about the tournament, it is not a normal stroke play. There are three different types of play. One is an alternate shot, which means you and your partner take turns hitting the ball till it goes in. Then there was a two man scramble, which is when you play the best ball till you get into the hole. The final one is best score. It is as it sounds you and your partner play the hole and then take the best score. Now that we have got you caught up with the information you need we will start with how the tournament went.

We pulled up one hour before the match started. This had been the earliest we had been to a match and the range still was not open to us. We all went and got dressed and then hit the putting green and just tried to get a feel for the greens so we could at least have something to save us from big numbers. Ten minutes before the match started we finally got to hit the range, but there were a very limited number of balls so we did not get to loosen up as much as we would have liked. The match starts and the three groups of us all go our separate ways, never to see each other till the end of the match.

My partner, Talon, and I were playing like no other people have played before. We just started off hot and never cooled down. It comes to the back stretch of our match, we come to a very crucial moment. I have about a 3 foot tap in putt for par. I ended up letting the pressure of making sure to hit it firm, that I hit it with no momentum at all and it died right in front of the hole. This is an important detail when we get to the end. As we hit our final hole all pressure is on as we need a par to have a chance at the win. We get to the green and I have a 5 foot putt for par. The same thing happens but push it right and leave it with a tap in for bogey.

We finished with a 77 and we felt really good about it because we had played some really good golf. We left the meet not knowing the results. Then two days later we get our results and it turns out as a team we had gotten 4th out of 16. Individually our team did really well. Scramble shot an 86 which got them 8th out of 16. Best score had a tie for 4th place with a score of 80. The Talon and I had placed second with first beating us by one stroke.

I said that missing those putts would be important, and I was 100% correct about that. Talon and I still were happy with that performance and we got to feel good about ourselves as a team. Next time I will talk about the final meet of the season.

Earlier my golf team and I participated in the Lincoln Scramble tournament. We had one goal as a team entering the competition this year, and that was to do better than last year. To keep the story short we did that and a little extra on top of that.

My golf team is not exactly the best and we all know that. We are one of the teams that is more in the sport for the fun of it rather than to compete fully and win every match. We walked into this tournament knowing we had our work cut out for us. The competition was even better than last year with teams having some brand new prodigies entering their high school golf career. We got out of school bright and early to get to the course to set up the tournament scoring and tables for the coaches. After we got it all set up we enjoyed a nice team lunch with the most exquisite sandwich place, Jimmy Johns. We feasted like kings at the royal table. We were ready to go out and play to the best of our ability. The match started off like most of our team matches, the first hole was an absolute train wreck. None of us hit the fairway and we were set up for failure very early on.

Continuing the match we move on to one of the later holes, number 7. That was an amazing hole for us. I started off hitting a beautiful drive right down the middle of the fairway. Then our secret weapon as we call him Jason hit the most beautiful shot of the season from about 135 out from the green. The second the club made contact with the ball we all knew it was an amazing shot. The ball carried perfectly and hits the middle of the green and rolls to the hole and drops in. We have never been more hyped as a team than that moment right there. Entering the back stretch of the last 4 holes, we were 5 under as a team. After 2 of the last 4 holes we are now 6 under entering hole 17. This was a really memorable hole for us because we had a photo shoot after we finished this hole. Entering 18 we were still 6 under, our freshman prodigy hits an absolute nuke of a drive leaving us with like 200 left to the hole. Talon another young star then hits his best shot of the day putting us within 4 feet from the hole. We tapped in for our eagle and finished the match at 8 under. This was better than last years finished but no where near what we needed to place.

In the end we finished 7th out of 21 teams. We were not happy with our performance because we knew as a team playing at our home course we should have done so much better than what we did. In the end we were happy that we were able to do better than last year and improve as a team. We left a lot on the table that day. We picked it up though and cleaned up very well later on at a different tournament further into the season. I will talk about that one next time.