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By Randy Gardner

After 20 years of writing my column, I think that everyone pretty much knows that I write about what I am feeling at the moment that I sit down to the computer. Although it is a sports column, sometimes I deviate to something totally different but in the end, the message always is about life and being a better person.

I have been deluged with sports lately, from the State High School Football playoffs, the NFL, and MLS soccer, along with three of the teams I coach. But what I want to talk about today is bigger than all of those sports put together.

I didn’t write much about being thankful over the Thanksgiving holidays but it is something that I feel we lose on an everyday basis. Being thankful, that is for everything.

The reason I bring this up is that I am a huge country music fan and there is a husband and wife who were a very popular duo and are going through a very traumatic time. The couple is Joey and Rory, they are all over the internet as she is fighting cancer in the final stages and he is by her side everyday with their daughter. He is writing a blog everyday about their journey, This life I live. Please check it out. It will put life into perspective.

I get upset every week about the stupidest stuff, writing about people who cheat, people who have more money than they know what to do with and can manipulate fans of a specific city, and whether or not one parent’s kid is better than another. Ridiculous stuff, I must say. Life is about the everyday things that we all take for granted, like loving to the fullest and living for ourselves and our families.

Watching something like this unfold makes me want to be a better person—not just for the moment but every day. We spend so much time trying to make others see how great we are. Just be yourself and do things because they are right. How do we get this point across an a bigger scale especially to the kids out there?

This leads me into the point that connects to sports. The past two weekends my 2nd grade team played two different select teams. The first team was heckling my kids before the game and totally disrespecting the fans around the stands before the game. Even a random parent asked who they were because they were very disrespectful.

The nice part about this is that we went out and let them have it. They shut up pretty quickly. Last week, we played a team that handed it to us, because they were very good. After the game, in the handshake line, several of their kids were fiercely slapping hands with us like if to say: Ha Ha. What a bunch of disrespectful kids. It’s a shame.

This starts off at the coaching level. As a coach, I would never let this happen. The biggest part of sports is about respect and integrity. This leads me back to the opening part of my article—what are we teaching our kids these days? Life is about learning and understanding. I know all this may seem deep into feelings but we have to get back to some old-fashioned core values.

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