Marshfield High School won an MIAA Division 2 football state championship 10 years ago. I long-snapped for that team and loved it. It was a position I never played before, but the experience taught me an important lesson. Thanks to that experience, I like to find something no one else is doing and do it. No one else on the team spent much time long-snapping. Many guys fundamentally knew how to snap but weren’t particularly good at it, nor did they practice it much—because they got playing time elsewhere.
No one pushed back when I took most of the reps snapping the ball on the field goal unit in practice, even if someone else snapped in the games at the start of the season. Eventually, it became too hard for the coaches to ignore that I had fewer bad snaps in practice, especially on the field goal unit than the two guys who later went Division 1 at different positions. One of those guys was the Massachusetts high school football Gatorade Player of the Year and an All-American honorable mention the following season.
It was also before Marshfield produced its second NFL player: Miami Dolphins long snapper Zach Triner, who was on the Super Bowl LV Tampa Bay Buccaneers team with Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski—something that’s likely increased interest in the position. We lost two guys who long-snapped on varsity the previous season to graduation. The junior varsity team also lacked a long-snapper because it rarely punted. We won many games by 40 or more points, and the coach loved going for it on fourth down; the JV team punted maybe once. I was also a benchwarmer who didn’t play a single snap in the final two games of the 2013 JV season—and I’m still pissed at the JV coaches about it, even if I understand why they did it.
Long-snapping got me playing time for what was later named the South Shore’s 2010s team of the decade by The Patriot Ledger. The paper published an article last month about that team’s dominance. I’m sure they would’ve won the state title if I was never born, but I was, and I have a ring to show for it. Virtually everyone on the team was more athletic than me. Most could lift more weight and run faster, but no one else snapped a ball at a tree for hours per day during the offseason—and taught themselves how to play a new position by reading WikiHow and watching YouTube videos. Nor did they receive tepid interest from Div. 3 and NAIA colleges to play the position at the next level. If they did, they would’ve been much better at long-snapping than me. It let me contribute to a dominant team and afforded me more playing time at Gillette Stadium in the state championship game. The team steamrolled western Massachusetts powerhouse Longmeadow 45-6.
Growing up, I always wanted to win an Eastern Massachusetts Super Bowl at Marshfield High School (Massachusetts didn’t have state championships until 2013), and achieving this goal required me to think differently than everyone else. That’s the biggest lesson I take from this state championship win. That causes me to eschew conventional thinking because so many hard-working and talented people exist. If I can’t beat people at their strengths, why not go about life differently?
While others went to college to pursue journalism, I dropped out of Emerson College after one year; I was already a high school sports reporter by the end of high school and wrote articles for a magazine sold outside of Fenway Park. The downside to this is that I never learned production skills. Most people might gain experience writing about pro sports with some unpaid internships at daily newspapers. I pitched the hometown newspapers of various athletes to write articles about them. I tried to find as many contract work gigs as possible, knowing that working myself into the ground at a young age would provide me with some advantages. Sports journalism never really worked out, though I covered a handful of NHL games when I was 18 and 19, met and interviewed David Ortiz as a freshman in college, and covered a Boston Red Sox game for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when I was 20; the latter required some innovative thinking as I saw the Pirates would be in three cities in three days, so I reached out to every publication that covered the team to see if they needed help.
Even though sports journalism never worked out, it helped me get into political journalism due to the intersection of sports and politics—another niche I’ve carved because most people in journalism are liberal. I’m not. I got my start in right-wing media at LifeZette, writing a lot about the NFL’s national anthem protests. Like most Americans, I hated seeing people kneel for the flag. Understanding sports and politics also got me a contributor role with the Washington Examiner, where I wrote opinion articles for six years.
That knowledge of the intersection of sports and politics helps because our country has shifted to the right, and males in girls’ sports is a contentious social issue. Since the legacy media often ignores these stories, I’ve again found an angle since the most viewed articles on NewBostonPost are typically about this topic.
I don’t envision staying in political journalism forever since it’s dying, and politics frustrates me. I have no clue what comes after it. I’ll have to think hard to find a way to make a decent living without a degree. I’ve reinvented myself before, so I’m not afraid to do it again,