COACHES

DONIPHAN STONE

All through out my life I have had the burning desire to want to push my body to its limits.  Beginning to walk at the age of 8 months I got a head start with kicking the soccer ball.  I began structured soccer at the age of 4 and taekwondo at the age of 6. Before I was 10 years old I had gone to the junior Olympics twice for sparring in taekwondo and received the bronze medal my second year.  When Soccer began to become more competitive I began to focus more on Soccer and Taekwondo began to be my second sport. 

In middle school I began practicing with the High School varsity team at Mountain Vista, the High School I would be attending the following year.  Coming into High School as a freshman and already acquainted with the varsity team I started as the teams leading forward.  I scored the first goal of the season for the varsity team in the first game within the first five minutes.  I was on top of the world in my first semester in High School, already having accomplished so much in athletics and the future seemed like the sky was the limit.

Now I am not writing all of my early achievements in athletics as a way to pat myself on the back but to hit on my next point which began my second semester of High School when I was diagnosed with a very rare bone cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma.  The night of February 7, 2005 my life was flipped upside down and would never be the same of how I once knew it.  All of my health that I once had was stripped from my life as if it were a leaf blown away by a light breeze.  That day I realized how fragile our lives are and how easy it is to take advantage of our health.  External circumstances should never determine what goes on inside of us.  I know what it is like to not have health, to be in pain every second of life for 6 months, to go from running a 6 minute mile to not being able to run 10 feet, and looking death in the eye.

When we have the opportunity to be able to take care of ourselves we must do everything in our power to give it all that we have because if we don’t it may be too late.  Health is not just something you do every once and awhile and only do it because we have too.  We must take care of ourselves the best that we can because it improves our lives.  Every time we push ourselves and make our bodies stronger we are making everything in our lives stronger.