Just before School started in 1996.

Summer came and went with nothing of any real significance.  My first real day of school at TSB came on August 19, 1996.  I woke up, tried to eat breakfast… failed, and not because I was too nervous to eat, I’m never that.  However the food at TSB takes some getting used to. Then I went to class and sat there trembling waiting for the class to start. When the teacher came in my fear increased by 1000%.  I knew I was going to wind up getting kicked out of the school for my bad grades.

As the class began, and I started to see the way the classes worked, I was relieved that they were all pretty much the same classes I had taken in California.  English, Typing, Computer Lab, History, Civics, Science, Geography, Math, they were all pretty much the same.  I worked very hard to keep my grades up, for more than one reason.  Primarily I wanted to prove that I wasn’t an idiot.

Some of my family believed that I was stupid, and didn’t have the intelligence or dedication to make anything of myself other than a welfare dependent slacker who would live on food stamps and the handouts of others the rest of my life.  I was determined to prove these people wrong, I was going to get a legitimate high school diploma not a GED, not a special education diploma, but a real high school diploma that was not just handed to me. Failure was NOT an option.

Run Teddy Run!!!

The other reason was I wanted to be on the sports teams.  If your grades weren’t Bs or better you couldn’t join the teams, and therefore you couldn’t travel.  That’s right travel.  As I had mentioned before, each state has usually only one school for the blind, and while we would sometimes compete against public schools in wrestling and forensics, we didn’t usually compete outside of the NCASVH (North Central Association of Schools for the Visually Handicapped).

This organization consisted of 16 schools that would travel to different schools to compete 3 – 4 times per sports season, of which there were three. Track and field in the fall, cheerleading & wrestling in the winter, & wwimming and forensics (public speaking) in the spring. At the end of each sports season we would have what we called the NC Conference this was the super bowl of blind school competition.  A great way to meet new people, have fun, travel, and interact with others from all over the country.  Honestly if it wasn’t for the NCs I would have never met my future wife, but that’s another show.

At the beginning of the school year I joined the track team, I wasn’t too bad at short bursts like the 60 or 100 yard dash, completing the 60 yard dash in about 8.75 seconds, nowhere near the world record of 5:99 held by Lee McRae a former student of University of Pittsburgh. I decided that I was better off managing the track team rather than competing.  So I became the manager of the girls track team, which had some rather obvious fringe benefits.  I was dating one of the girls on the team as well so this worked out quite nicely for me.  The Tennessee track team was very good due in part to the efforts of the coach Bill Schenk.  I don’t remember our exact placing, I believe it was 2nd over all.  What was great was this was just the beginning.  Things were going to keep getting better and better.  It’s kind of cool to look back on my memories like this, I know what happened after the fact but back then I didn’t look at things that way.