In my first entry I promised a look back at how I got to this point so now I want to make good on that promise. I guess the best place to start is always at the beginning, and for me, the journey of becoming a football coach probably began when I was really little. I virtually grew up with a football in my hand! Some of the earliest home movies of me are videos of my dad and I playing catch with a small rubber football in our living room, much to my mom's disliking. There is even a funny moment caught on camera where my Dad throws me the football and instead of catching it, I kinda knock it down. My Dad says, "Hey, you're supposed to catch it!" And I reply, "But that's what the Aggies do!" More on Aggie football woes later!

Baseball may be America's sport but in my house football was king. While most fathers and sons were playing catch with baseballs and gloves, I was pretending to be Micheal Irvin (pre-cocaine issues) and my Dad filled in admirably as Troy Aikmen. If you'd have asked me then, I was going to be the next great wide receiver! Unfortunately at seven, I didn't know that you had to be over six feet tall and fast. I wasn't there for the discussions but I'm sure my Dad had to play some major bargaining chips for me to start my football career. By the time I was in 5th grade my father had convinced my mother that it was time for me to strap on the shoulder pads and play full contact football in the Pop Warner leagues. My first team was the Pflugerville Panthers! In our Yellow and Gold glory we beat just about every team we played until we got to the playoffs where we met teams from San Antonio. To this day I maintain that some of their players had children of their own in the stands. Those were some BIG dudes and we got whipped!

Like most kids in Texas, when 7th grade rolls around you enter "The Program." Middle School football is essentially the breeding ground for future Friday night superstars and I was no exception in that I joined the middle school team. We ran dumbed down versions of the offensive and defensive schemes the high school ran so that, in theory, by the time we reached high school we would already have a basic understanding of what we were supposed to do at the varsity level. When I reached high school, in a different school district than where I started, I'd already been playing football for four years.

Throughout high school I established myself as a solid player. Too good to keep off the field but frankly never good enough to really stand out. I played Quarterback, Punter, Linebacker, and several positions across the offensive line but when it was all said and done, none of the colleges were knocking on my door. My last game as a senior in high school was fittingly against the high school where my football career started, the Pflugerville Panthers. They beat us badly in an emotional game where I was pitted against some of the kids that I grew up playing with in Pop Warner and Middle School. My playing days ended that night but my love for the game did not!

After high school I went off to Texas A&M and joined the Corps of Cadets. As a member of The Corps, I went to every home football game that Texas A&M played and had pretty darn good seats to watch as a once proud program went through some of its darkest days. Everyone, from the newest spectator to the oldest hand in football, had an opinion on what the Aggies needed to do to turn the ship around. It was at this point that coaching football became of great interest to me. I wanted to know what was going on at Texas A&M and how it could be fixed. I wanted to break down the X's and O's and see where things had gone so horribly wrong. I still don't know the answer to that question but maybe over the next few years I'll figure it out.

As college started to wind down I began wondering what I wanted to do with my life. I thought about coaching football and teaching history or government but I knew that if I went that route, I'd probably never become the millionaire that I hoped I could become. Instead, one of my professors approached me one day and asked if I would like to meet with a representative from an international winery and interview for a job. As a freshly turned 21 year old, a job with a winery selling booze sounded like the perfect job! After a couple rounds of interviews and some wining and dining with the big wigs in Dallas, I was sold! I was going to go be a wine connoisseur who sold first rate wine to all the finest places in the world. Only thing was, I had to start at the bottom like everyone else. I wasn't opposed to that idea, everyone has to earn their stripes, so I moved to Houston and was given a sales territory out in Katy, Texas. My job was to sell as much wine as possible (often of dubious quality) to grocery store chains by whatever means necessary. After a year of running around Houston selling cheap booze to Walmarts and Krogers the glamour and fortune that I had envisioned seemed farther away from me than the Great Wall of China. I was tired of promising things that my company had no intention of delivering on. I was tired of forcing wine into grocery stores that didn't want it. In short, I learned real fast that it takes a certain kind of person to be a good salesman and that I was not that person. I want to make it very clear that not all wine salesmen are like that. In fact one of my best friends is a pretty successful wine salesman who seems to have done it the right way. I just happened to be "blessed" with a management team who played fast and loose with the rules and that just didn't appeal to my idealistic sense of self. As I drove home one morning after having spent the last 24 hours straight preparing for a corporate survey of one of my stores it hit me. All the freakin' money in the world just isn't worth doing this. What is it that I love? What is it that I can see myself doing for the rest of my life with a big smile on my face? The answer had always been there. Football! It was at that point that I decided I was going to go back to school, get my teaching certificate, and do what ever it took to become a football coach.

So here we are. I'm the newest member of a brand new coaching staff for the Four Points Falcons in Austin, TX. In the next few days I'll be leaving the liquor industry for good and embarking on a journey I hope will last a life time. In about a week, I'll be headed up to San Angelo for my first coaching clinic where Mac Brown, Nick Saban, Jason Garrett, Wade Phillips, and so many other top notch coaches will be talking and teaching football. To say I'm excited is the understatement of the century!

In the next few installments of Confessions of a Coach Bob, I'll be going over what I learned at the San Angelo Coaching Clinic as well as continuing to talk all things football. We are a few months out from the beginning of the season so bear with as blog updates will be sporadic until things get going full scale.

And remember: "Gentlemen, it is better to have died a small boy than to fumble this football." - Bear Bryant while at Texas A&M