Over the summer I received a letter from the Mount. It read, "If you want to play football you must attend the practices on the dates designated". Oh Boy!! Here we go. I was on my way to my dream. As I said in the previous blog. These practices were brutal. The first week passed and I started to notice that we had some kids that had some talent. It was going to take a lot of work to be able to make this team. I had to get noticed, I didn't just want to make this team , I wanted to be a starter. I distinctly remember the first time I was noticed by our coaches. We were running this drill where the quarterbacks would throw to the receivers as we stood in two lines. We were running a pattern called a post, it was already evident that a kid named Kevin O'Neill was emerging as our starting quarterback. As I ran down the field , under the watchful eye of my coaches, I was coming out of my break and the ball was thrown, Kevin was usually a accurate QB, but this time the ball was going to be high. I leaped in the air and snatched the ball out of the air with one hand. As my feet hit the ground I over heard my head coach tell the other coach, "See what I mean." Those words were my confirmation that I was going in the right direction. I was going to make the team. Now I had to start. Each day Kevin and I would work on our pass patterns and we began to click. The day came when we had to cut some of the people on the team. The day the cut list was posted my heart was in my mouth. As we gathered around the board in the locker room, I searched for my name. I was relieved when I noticed my name was not on the list. I was still in the running to make the team. Finally, after 3 weeks of practice with no equipment, we were assigned to get our pads and helmet. Our QB Kevin O'Neill's name was called, next was our tight end, Aldo Nastasi, next was Robert Tunney our guard, and then after all that work all that sweat all that pain my name was called. It was as if I won the lottery. Getting our equipment first could only mean one thing. I was going to start. I was the opening day wide receive for our team. As our first year in high school began we all amassed in the (quadrangle) school yard. I noticed many faces I didn't recognize. We instantly formed clicks, all the kids that attended the Mount St. Michael's grammar school huddled together, the others were mulling about. Some of the people who survived the football practices were also bonding together. We weren't a team yet but it was starting to happen. At the Mount we had to carry all our books in a school bag, sort of a large bowling bag looking contraption, the bag weighed about 20 lbs. On this particular day Mike Schlitte decide to prank Joe Capalbo. This was an ongoing feud that started way back in their grammar school and would continue, apparently, throughout high school. So every morning one would dump the others books all over the ground and force the other to be late for class. One problem, if you were late back then, you would get JUG. That means you would have to stay after school and sit in a room for a designated amount of time. This would be problematic for our team because if you got JUG you would miss a part of the after school practice. One day the pranking got to a breaking point when Schlitte dumped a can of creamed corn in Capalbo's school bag. The fight was on, somehow we broke it up before the brothers had to, because that infraction would get you a beating from one of them and jug on top of that. After this incident we started to tone down our before school activities. Football as the one thing that kept me and everyone on the team straight. We never wanted to failed any of our academic courses because we wanted to play football, this was our driving force.