By Troy Vincent
NFL Player Engagement
Your long-awaited new football season is finally starting here in September, and now is the time to reap what you have sown over the past nine months.
What you did to prepare this past summer, spring and winter is showing up on the field, both in front of fans on Fridays and Saturdays and in front of your coaches and teammates during practice.
You either got better or worse since the last time you officially lined up and participated in games that count. There is no such thing as in-between.
How did you spend the summer? What did you do to stimulate your mind?
Did you sharpen your academic skill set by stimulating your mind and reading books? Or were you on your cell phone Tweeting, Instagramming, Facebooking, and taking pictures?
Did you improve your athletic ability by working on your weaknesses, or did you focus solely on your strengths? Did you address your deficiencies both academically and athletically? Or were you finding reasons to relax rather than train?
Until now, only you truly know the answers to these questions. But now, your day of reckoning is here and what you did is showing up before your friends and family.
For those of you that maximized each and every offseason moment to get better, then the dividends are paying off through the return on your off-season investment.
You are going to see that what you put in is what you get out.
Because of the emphasis on health and safety, athletes are spending less time on the field.
This has created shorter training camps across the country, which are now only a few weeks with two-a-days becoming a thing of the past and reduced hours of practice time per week. That means less time that the coach is actually teaching you your position, so every rep really counts.
But still, not enough to sustain you for a year of great success.
That also translates into you now having more unregulated time that you have to use wisely. Time that you could read an additional book, or learn something entirely new.
Or study film, since this suddenly is becoming almost obsolete, but is still the way both student athletes and professionals sustain themselves by being students of the game.
In the end, self-accountability, self-inventory, and self-regulation have never been more important, especially come September.
As Dr. Charles Stanley said in a Sunday sermon, “You reap what you sow, more than you sow, later than you sow. You never know when the harvest is coming.”