Pride Still Matters

Go ahead. Judge me for what I'm about to say. I've made peace with it.

Football is Art. Football is Divine. Football is Spirit-driven. Yes, it's just a sport…a brutally dangerous one that destroys bodies and scrambles brains. 

But it's so much more than that. The game has this uncanny ability to humble even the most insufferably arrogant souls walking this earth. It certainly humbled mine.

THE BOOK THAT CALLED ME OUT

Nearly two decades ago, I picked up a book that would shake me to my 17 year old core: When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi by David Maraniss. As a football junkie who revered the late, great Vince Lombardi, I couldn't wait to devour his story.

I was 17 years old, sitting in the middle-of-nowhere Virginia, and that title hit me like a pulling guard I didn't see coming.

When pride still mattered?!?!

Wait. What the hell you mean by that?

What you on right now Coach?

I took it personally. It was like a direct attack on my game and mindset at the time, almost like questioning me like I didn't approach the game of football with the same reverence Lombardi did. That defensive reaction? That's exactly why I needed to read that book. Turns out, my gut instinct about that title was spot on, because I had everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, completely fucked up. Football. Life. All of it.

THE HARD HEAD & THE SOFT ASS

At 17, I was swimming in an inflated sense of self. The old heads called it "smelling yourself." I couldn't tell the difference between EGO and PRIDE yet, and that ignorance had already taxed me and was going to continue to cost me if I allowed it to.

The place where I cracked open that Lombardi biography? Fork Union Military Academy. FUMA. An all-boys military boarding school in the absolute middle-of-fucking-nowhere, Central Virginia.

Boys end up at FUMA for different reasons. For me? The OG Last Chance U. At this point in my life, I'd made some spectacularly poor decisions, and this was where hard heads like mine got straightened out. I wasn't a punk, but I was a world-class deflector, a master of avoiding accountability, ducking real adversity, and talking my way out of consequences. FUMA didn't play that game. It was football and military precision. Decision-making and real consequences. A crash course in URGENCY and INTENT.

FOOTBALL IS IN MY BLOOD

I've been breathing football since I could breathe at all. My father was a diehard Oakland Raiders fan from back when they were the premier NFL dynasty from “The Heidi Game” to “The Immaculate Reception” to “The Sea of Hands” to “Old Man Willie” in Super Bowl XI, through Super Bowl XV & XVIII. Legend has it he named me Markus because of Marcus Allen's historic MVP performance in Super Bowl XVIII. I don't know if that's completely true, but I've never questioned it because it felt right.

As a jit, when football season ended, we religiously studied dubbed over VHS NFL Films tapes narrated by Steve Sabol. My father would pause, rewind, and break down plays like we were preparing for the draft. He'd use the greats as teaching tools, not just about football, but about life. He played catch with me until I was old enough to hold my own with my friends. He built a gym in our garage and trained me. He showed up to every single game I ever played, all the way through my Senior Day at South Carolina State University.

Football was never forced on me. It was a bond and a bridge to the things and people I cared about most. I'm a diehard football fan, a true purist, and still, to this day, a student of the game.

I stand on that timeless cliché: "Football is Life."

I believe it with every ounce of my heart. The game literally saved my life, kept me from spiraling down a path I might not have survived. It's done the same for countless others.

TAKE CARE OF FOOTBALL & IT WILL TAKE CARE OF YOU

I wasn't good enough to go pro. That hurt to accept, but I knew I couldn't leave the game nor didn't want to. My mentor would always says, "If you take care of football, she will take care of you."

True words have never been spoken.

After FUMA straightened me out and I graduated, earning my letter all four years at THE South Carolina State University, I thought I wanted to be a politician. Everything I did in college prepared me for public service in my hometown of Hampton, Virginia. But my heart knew better. My pride knew where it belonged.

So I got back on the gridiron, first as a student assistant Defensive Line coach, then as a Strength & Conditioning intern. That transition from the grass to the weight room was the best decision of my adult life. I realized that if I wanted to impact as many individuals as possible, if I wanted to holistically affect the entire team and program, the weight room and being in those trenches with the guys was my platform.

That shift wasn't driven by ego. It was directed by pride… pure, undiluted love for the game.

THE CANCER OF EGO

Conscious Evolution vs. Default Settings

By title, I've been a Strength & Conditioning Coach for 15 years. I’ve worked with and trained various collegiate sports early on in my career, ranging from football to bowling, but over the last decade it has just been football.

I wouldn't call myself old, but I'm not young anymore. I'm seasoned like a cast iron pot, more than just experienced or merely existent. I choose those words deliberately because experience and existence, along with ego, have metastasized through this field like cancer. Pride in how we do our job and pride in how we go about treating people in the process doesn't seem to matter as much these days. I’m not speaking for every single human walking on this floating rock, but as a collective sum... It's not just a sports performance cancer. It's human cancer.

We have access to modern resources that make us more innovative, knowledgeable, and aware than any generation before us. And yet, we default to our brain's natural setting, ignoring our conscious evolution just to do less. Care less. Be lazy. Lack empathy. From government agencies like ICE abusing their powers domestically, to AI shortcuts, to half-assed hamstring return-to-play protocols, to women still earning less on the dollar than men make in identical roles, to educational systems where two-thirds of eighth graders can't read at grade level while we debate book bans instead of literacy, to the gender gap in youth sports where girls receive half the coaching resources boys do and drop out at twice the rate, to healthcare disparities where women's pain is dismissed as "emotional" while men's symptoms trigger immediate intervention, to colleges spending millions on new football facilities while cutting mental health services and academic programs, to climate policies abandoned after photo ops while heat-related deaths surge globally because we'd rather protect quarterly earnings than coastlines, to concussion protocols in professional sports that prioritize game schedules over brain health, to social media algorithms designed to addict teenagers to anxiety-inducing content while executives send their own kids to screen free schools, to emergency response systems that fail in marginalized communities while wealthy neighborhoods get instant attention. We have the data, the technology, the warnings, and the resources. What we lack is the will to give a damn.

WHAT I TAKE PRIDE IN

I am proud of the unbreakable bond my late father and I forged, with football right there in the center of it all.

I take pride in the life lessons this game taught me about adversity, perseverance, and triumphing with humility.

I take pride in empathizing with each athlete's individual dreams and goals as if they were my own.

I take pride in NOT being the quintessential "meathead" & in not making what I do in the weight room more important than it actually is. 

I take pride in my work not being about who I know, where I coached, or who I coached… none of that clout chasing claim to fame bullshit.

I take pride in my energy and how it affects every soul in my space.

I take pride in not just existing to collect a check, not just taking up space and stealing an opportunity from someone who truly earned it or deserved it and didn’t get that opportunity to walk in it.

I take pride in understanding I only know what I know and that's ok because I’m limited to what I've personally experienced. I seek experiences through others.

I take pride in knowing I don't know every fucking thing.

I take pride in being accountable for every decision and action of mine, regardless of whether others hold me accountable.

I take pride in not making everything about me.

I take pride in having pride in things that don't seem to matter these days.

I take pride in living in reality and not delusion. 

That pride drives me. It keeps me from drowning in the cesspool of complacency, ego, and mediocrity that's swallowing this profession and this culture as a whole.

So yes, I hope this offends someone like the book title offended me two decades ago because…

PRIDE STILL MATTERS!

It mattered to Lombardi. It mattered to my father. It matters to the game.

And if you're still here, still reading, still in this fight…IT MATTERS TO YOU TOO.

Don't lose it. Don't let the noise drown it out. Don't let the shortcuts and the ego and the endless scroll make you forget why you started.

Football is Art. Football is Divine. Football is Spirit-driven. FOOTBALL IS LIFE!

And Pride? Pride is what keeps it sacred.

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