From Football into Life

“Hike!”

This is probably going to be one of the harder things I’ve ever had to write, mostly because I am such a private person and this is going to require a lot of transparency into things that I, like most people, don’t like to talk about. This is the beginning of my journey from a life-long lineman to a regular person…and the transition isn’t as easy as I hoped it would be.

I have spent the past 6 months or so since my senior football season came to its end doing some reflection on who I am in relation to my health, especially when it comes to my mindset regarding food and exercise. Now, I’m sharing my conclusions, and my journey, with you.

Growing Up

I was always one of the bigger kids in my classes, growing faster that my classmates and built heavier. I’ve always been told I was going to be a football player (which I rejected vehemently most of my younger years) because I was bigger and stronger than the kids around me. Naturally, the big kid is built to be a lineman, right?

The photos above show my growth through middle school. As you can see, the weight had already started to pack on. Then, it was baby fat, but it is the foundation of my struggle even to this day. Part of the problem when everyone assumes you’re going to be a lineman is that they tell you that you should be a lineman–and more importantly, that you should eat like one.

Eating Like a Lineman

You might be thinking, “What does being told you should eat like a lineman mean, Ben? That doesn’t make sense.” Let me explain what this looked like for me growing up. If we went somewhere and had food–maybe a friend’s house, a church potluck, even a restaurant with people–they would say something along the lines of “Oh you’re a big kid! You’ll clean up whatever’s left over, right?”

To a growing boy, what this means is “It’s your job to eat as much as you can.” And I took it to heart. My line at these events became, “I’m going last so I don’t eat all the food.” And then I’d go last and heap my plate with food, then eat it all and go back for seconds or possibly even thirds. I know that I am just one of many, many young people to experience this type of conditioning about food.

When I started playing football, this only ramped up. I can’t tell you how many coaches I had that told me I needed to eat as much as possible so that I could put on weight and get stronger, especially once we started lifting weights. I know that this came from a place of helpfulness, but it is not a good message to be sending young athletes. It comes from a general lack of knowledge and understanding of how the body works and what is truly good for it.

These things, combined with a genetic inclination to put on weight, led me into a cycle of making poor health choices. I will say this, I didn’t have only bad influences. My parents worked to warn me of the dangers of this way of thinking, but by and large the things being put into my head were not healthy.

High School

Once I got to high school, I started to take more of an active role in my own health and wellbeing. I realized that the “Lineman Method” I had grown up being taught wasn’t healthy, so I tried to combat it. I began to think that cutting down how much I ate was enough to be healthy. My junior year of high school, I started football season weighing in at 242 lbs., and ended the season at 218 lbs. I even started to form some healthy habits!

I was pretty happy with where I was physically, I maxed my bench at 315 lbs. and my squat at 465 lbs. I was stronger than ever, and had less fat than ever. Then I broke my jaw right before my senior year and was forced to drink only smoothies and milkshakes. I was consuming 4,000 calories a day through a straw. But what you don’t think about is that for 4.5 weeks I only drank sweet things, and my original sweet tooth grew. Once my jaw was unwired, I was so used to the sweet things that I continued craving them. It didn’t go well from there.

College

University of Richmond

After my senior season of football in high school, I eventually committed to the University of Richmond for college to play fullback. If you don’t know much about football, fullbacks aren’t linemen and definitely can’t eat like them. Unfortunately, all I knew was playing on the line. That was my whole lifestyle and I didn’t do what it took to make that transition.

By the time I got to UofR in early August, I weighed in at around 250 pounds. To be fair, part of that was muscle (I was, after all, on a Division I weight lifting program). The pressure to lose weight there was intense. I was by far the heaviest freshman at a mid-skill position, and by even farther the slowest. (I will always be proud that I did not fail my conditioning test, despite my weight and lack of speed.)

However, college is a beast when it comes to food, even for those with healthy habits. For someone like me with horrible habits, it was dangerous. I never managed to lose weight during the season, but I didn’t put any on thanks to the high amount of physical activity I was doing. In fact, some of the fat was burned off while I put on muscle and got into the best cardiovascular shape of my life.

But my unhealthy habits caught up to me after I decided to transfer from Richmond to McDaniel College and stopped working out with the football team. I also broke my thumb and caught mono at the same time, so I couldn’t even work out on my own for a long time. I put on weight in a major way (UofR puts $1 million a year into just their dessert bar and it’s right at the front of the dining hall when you walk in…so you can imagine how that went).

McDaniel College

See my McDaniel story here!

I walked into McDaniel College in August of 2017 weighing 265 lbs. Before I left Richmond I had ballooned up to 272 before I started working out again and trying to control what I ate more actively. I was back on the line again, and I made every excuse in the book to not control my weight like I should have. If I had, I probably would have been far more successful in my three years as a Green Terror.

Above, the picture on the left is me before my sophomore year at McDaniel. On the right is me my senior year. You can see the drastic difference between the two pictures (and I don’t mean the hair). I started at 265 and finished my senior season between 285 and 290. In 5 years, I put on 70 pounds. 70 pounds. It doesn’t seem like that much from year to year, but the grand total is huge. Yes there was muscle growth in that time that could have contributed some to the weight gain, but it is clear that the majority of that weight was not healthy.

Moving Towards the Future

This is where I stand now. 295 pounds, at least 50 of it is fat. I’m getting married in October to the most beautiful woman on the planet, and if I don’t make a change it’s only going to get worse from here. I want to be able to be a coach, I want my knees to stop hurting, and I want to be able to take Desi on our honeymoon in October and not be ashamed to take my shirt off at the beach.

I’m writing this to hold myself accountable to make this change. It isn’t for anyone else, it isn’t because people have called me fat or shamed me or anything. In fact, it’s the opposite. I want to change because I know it is necessary. God didn’t create us to be over-indulgent beings. We are supposed to be balanced. And on top of that, I have a responsibility to properly take care of what He has given me: my body included.

That means changing how I think about food, how I eat, and how I exercise. I am committed to that change. 50 pounds. 6 months. Weekly check-ins.

Let’s go.

From Football Into Life Part III: Day 27 Update

I know I said I’d post weekly, but that just hasn’t been in the cards for me while I’ve been finishing up school and working remotely. The grind has continued, but the writing has tailed off. Sorry…

Anyway, today I hit a major milestone: I eclipsed the 20 pound mark! 27 days in and I’ve lost 20.4 pounds. I weighed in at 275 even today, which isn’t a good weight but it is a significant improvement. 1/3 of the way to my goal!

That being said, it has not been an easy time over the past week or so. I’m not sure why but my hunger has come back in the evenings, which makes it really hard to stay on track sometimes. I’m really blessed because I’ve had my whole family doing this with me and they can hold me accountable. It’s hard to cheat when you’re doing something with partners!

I’m not sure that I have any standing to give advice, but if any of my readers are giving this weight-loss thing a try, do it with someone who will hold you accountable. That goes for most things in life, but this is so critical. If it was just me, I would’ve been over at Chipotle in two seconds flat. Man, I love me some Chipotle…

I can tell that my mindset is changing throughout this whole thing. The cravings have (mostly) gone now, and food is becoming a necessary part of life rather than an indulgent part of life. Pretty much all sugar has been cut out of my diet, which was a huge stumbling block for me before. I can tell that I’m learning to like the healthy foods more. And my stomach is shrinking as well, so I don’t feel like I need to have huge meals every time I sit down to eat.

From Football into Life: Part II

10 Days In

So, it’s been 10 days since I started my journey into regular life. I’ve lost 12 pounds already and I’m feeling super pumped about it! It’s definitely been a struggle at times, but it’s been well worth it!

One of the best things about the past 10 days is that my family is on this journey with me. All of us are following the same plan to get healthy and take control of our lives and eating habits. Essentially, what we’re doing is portion control and meal timing.

So, we eat within an hour of waking up and then every 2-3 hours after that until we go to bed (basically, 6 meals a day). On days that I don’t work out, 5 of those meals are very, very small: usually no more than 110-120 calories. What this does is keep my metabolism burning but not only working on the calories I’ve eaten, burning into the fat I have stored up. The last meal is called a “Lean and Green,” where I eat 5-7 ounces of meat (depending on its leanness) and then some healthy vegetables.

These vegetables don’t include the starchier forms such as potatoes, carrots, brussels sprouts, etc. This means I’m getting all kinds of great nutrients, but it also is changing my perspective on how large my portion sizes should be. Instead of using a regular dinner plate, I can often fit my meals into a saucer for my meats and a medium-sized bowl of salad or greens.

I’m 1/5th of the way to my goal and feeling good! I need to be 235 by August 10th so that I can try on my suit for my wedding in October. Feeling confident about getting there!

Ben

The Truth About McDaniel Football: A Rebuttal

Image courtesy of @katie.o.photographs (Twitter and Instagram)

Mr. Finnerty,

I thought it appropriate to write you in response to your recent article, mostly to set a few things straight about Division III sports and especially the McDaniel Football program. I appreciate the thought you put into this article, but it is rather evident that you are somewhat uneducated on the facts in this area.

First of all, I am at a loss to reconcile your title with the rest of your article. You say that if academic programs are under scrutiny, athletic programs should be also, but then go on to only attack our football program. Perhaps this is because football comprises the largest number of student-athletes at McDaniel, or perhaps it’s because football is the most talked-about sport in America in this day and age. Regardless, your article doesn’t address at all the positive things that football brings to McDaniel (which I will address throughout my response), nor does it speak to solutions regarding all sports at McDaniel. In short, it seems that your title is merely an attention-grabber for a chance to slander the football team.

Secondly, I want to address your general lack of understanding of how Division III sports work in general, and the way athletics and football are funded here at McDaniel. For example, you state that the football team gets “undisclosed amounts in scholarships,” but it is widely known that Division III athletes do not get athletic scholarships. Furthermore, the “multi-million-dollar stadium renovation” that you speak of was given through a donation to the school specifically for the stadium. It wasn’t just for football but also for all of our other outdoor sports programs. Every team except men’s and women’s soccer uses that turf stadium for both practices and games (and by the way, soccer uses their grass fields that also came from—guess what—a donation). Even sports that don’t use the field for games such as baseball and softball use the turf to conduct practice when their fields are unplayable. I would also like to point out that the turf field is open to the community for use when McDaniel sports aren’t practicing. So that donation goes even further to benefit not just football players, but also our community at large. Almost everything purchased for the football team is bought using money that comes from donors giving specifically for the football team, which then goes to also benefit other sports on campus. If you don’t have football, you don’t have those donations.

You also mention the thousands of fans that we get year-in and year-out, which seems counterintuitive to me. If you look at the statistics, we have actually gained more fans in the past few years, including posting a historic 15,000-person attendance to our homecoming game in 2017. We average between 3,000 and 4,000 people per game, and yet your thought is that students and alumni can gather around “less physically harmful sports.” People want to see football. As much as I love going to watch my fellow student-athletes’ games, our community, our student body, and our alumni are all excited about McDaniel Football games. There’s something about football that draws fans, and that’s a good thing! As for the physical toll it takes on our bodies, as someone who has dealt with major injuries and multiple surgeries, I would do it all again for the sport I love. So would any one of my teammates. We came to McDaniel because it gives us a great opportunity to pursue high-level academics and play competitive football—injuries and all. We don’t feel exploited by McDaniel; we’re happy to volunteer our “bodies and minds” for our sport and our family here on the Hill.

You claim that we have “gotten away” with our record for far too long, and yet you ignore the fact that McDaniel fired the previous football coach only three years ago. If you look at any rebuilding team, you know that it takes at least three years to make any kind of difference due to new recruiting, developing players, etc. That being said, this year McDaniel has the number one defense in the Centennial Conference through eight games, after being last in the conference before the new coaching staff was put together. While it is true that our record doesn’t necessarily reflect our improvement to the extent that we’d like it to, statistics and scores show that we’re far more competitive in games over the past three years than we had been in the five years before the coaching change. If nothing else, this proves that McDaniel Football is on the incline.

You also argue that McDaniel could save an “unknown” amount of money by cutting the football program to reallocate money towards scholarships and academic programs. However, it would in fact be less productive for the college to do this for one huge reason: over the past 27 years, for football players who have stayed in the program all four years, only 3 players have not graduated. That’s a 99% graduation rate for football players. Few scholastic programs boast such a high graduation rate, regardless of how much money is pumped into them. One could even claim that McDaniel’s investment in the football program is really an investment in its future graduates.

Finally, McDaniel’s academic mission is supported by its athletic mission. As football players, we are consistently pushed by our coaches and our faculty advisor (the esteemed Dr. Gretchen McKay) to strive for greatness both in the classroom and on the field. You could argue we are more motivated to keep good grades than the average student because we have so much more to lose. If we don’t perform in the classroom, it can end up taking football away from us permanently. We push ourselves to be the best in the classroom so we have the opportunity to be the best on the field. In this way, athletics support the academic mission of the college.

In no way do we feel that we have a singular claim to the Green Terror identity—in fact, we want all students at McDaniel to have the spirit we work so hard to embody. McDaniel Football doesn’t hold claim to that identity, but we do feel that we enrich it and provide a more spirited environment for our peers. It is our goal to live out that spirit on the gridiron.

Best regards,

Ben Stapleton

Defensive Line, #41

GET ON THE HILL BABY!

Read the original article here.