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Justin Worlley, senior at TMI and St. David's parishioner, gave his chapel talk before his TMI peers.
August 29, 2010
Chapel Talk
All of my life, I’ve been told not to say “I can’t.” When I was a child and told my dad I couldn’t do something he would always say, “If that’s what you think, then you’re probably right.” I often found it very frustrating that he felt no sympathy for my inability do whatever it was I thought I couldn’t do, but looking back I realize that there is more to his smart-aleck remark than I could then understand.
Every summer since the fifth grade I’ve ended the school year telling my friends, “I’m going to hit my growth spurt this summer. I’m sure of it”. And every year I would return to school, still the little guy. Being a middle school student who cared about nothing more than playing football, I saw this lack of height as a major issue. Despite my anger at this disadvantage, I tried not to let it affect me. I still went out to football practice everyday and continued to stand on the sidelines at every game, just hoping for my chance to get in and make the big plays that all of the coaches’ sons made. I never really had my chance to play much for the Pop Warner football team, but I stayed positive, because I knew that 7th grade football tryouts were just nine months away. A season of basketball and a season of baseball more quickly than I’d expected and it was time show a coaching staff that wasn’t composed of a bunch of team dads, that I could be a starter on the football team. First day of practice came and just as I thought, I was the smallest player there. But this was nothing new. About two weeks into practice the coach tells us to divide up according to your position. We began to do drills, and I don’t know what the mistake was, but I made the same one more than once. The coach who was working with the quarterbacks was not happy. He said to me “Worley, you’re not a football player. Just go home”. My heart sank. I didn’t know what to say so I just responded, “sorry coach” and went in, gathered my things, and went home. I was sure that I was never going to play football again. I thought about it a lot that night and decided that I cared more about the game than what that coach thought of me and the next day I asked him if I could go back out for practice. He told me I could but he doesn’t think I’m going to be big enough to compete and I probably wouldn’t get any play time. I went out to practice anyway and worked hard every day and ended up playing quarterback for the team. *** It felt like a great accomplishment to be a part of the team because it put me one step closer to my dream of playing varsity football under the lights.
The two years of middle school football flew by and before I knew it I was beginning two a days at my new high school, TMI. Coming from a public school, I didn’t know what to expect, so I just showed up to practice with an attitude that I was going to do whatever it took be able to play on Friday nights. Practice began on August 6, 2007 and when I got there I realized, once again, that at five foot three, one hundred and twelve pounds, I was the smallest player at camp. That wasn’t going to stop me. I stuck to my goal, and worked as hard as I could everyday so that sophomore year, in the opening game against Ben Bolt, I could start on the varsity defense. Everyone is faced with something that can inhibit them from doing what they want to do if they let it. For me it was my lack of height, for my cousin Jayson, it was being born with a heart deficiency.
In September 2004, Jayson Stulsas was born without the left half of his heart. His lower intestine died due to lack of blood flow from the heart after his first open heart surgery. The doctors then had to do a surgery in which they removed 27 inches of his lower intestine. One of the valves in his heart failed and had to be replaced twice, once with an artificial pig valve and the second with a mechanical valve. Jayson lived on a ventilator for a month after his second open heart surgery and was fed through a tube for six of the first months of his life. In his first year, he had three strokes, one of which disabled him from using his left hand. It took him a while longer than usual to learn to walk and talk, but as soon as he could, he loved sports. Because he was not able to catch with his left hand, he learned to throw with his left and catch with a baseball glove on his right. He now is on a gymnastics team and carries a football with him at all times. It is amazing that he is doing as well as he is because there were a few times where it didn’t look like he was going to make it. It would have been easy for him to give up, but he didn’t. He has endured more pain than most people will in their lives, and he did it with a smile on his face. He had a good attitude all the way through and is now doing the things he really wants to do. Jayson is my inspiration for playing with heart. When I think it’s getting tough and I might want to quit, I think that Jayson could have quit and not been able to accomplish the things he wanted to, but he didn’t, so neither will I. He didn’t make it through the surgeries because he just gave up and said “I can’t”, but because he has heart. (He literally has a heart).
I didn’t get the opportunity to play varsity football because I was a great football player, and I didn’t get that opportunity because I was big. I got to play because I had heart, and that is most important. Having heart will make a man feel better about himself than any amount of size and talent will ever make him feel.
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