College Food For Thought - My Sports Background

My first sport wasn’t powerlifting.

I never thought I was going to be a powerlifter. I didn’t even know what powerlifting was until a friend at the gym introduced me to it. I knew about bodybuilding and the greats, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but never about competitive powerlifting.

Baseball and basketball were my two sports growing up. In high school, I was cut from the basketball team twice, only playing a full season my junior year. I played JV baseball for the majority of my freshman, sophomore and junior years, and I played varsity with a minimal amount of playing time my senior year. I did run cross country for the last three years of high school, but shin splints and weight gain subsequently made the latter two years really tough on both a physical and mental level. I would be named captain in my senior year of cross country, but as a runner, I was pretty much settling at the back of the pack.

Wow, high school sucked.

Perhaps the most infuriating thing about high school sports was that I worked my ass off much more than a lot of the kids who merely showed up on day one and stopped training on the last day of the season.

I took humility in my sports abilities. I knew I wasn’t going to be the star athlete going into any of the sports I was doing. I had low confidence and low self-esteem when it came to sports, but I did them because I wanted to get better at them. I had a stellar sophomore year in baseball, but that didn’t really get me anywhere in the coaches’ eyes. I was cut my sophomore year from the basketball team, but I stayed on as the manager and was able to practice with the team. I did all of the cross country workouts that I was supposed to, even if my shins would make me want to quit.

Around the same time I got my license, I got my first gym membership. I remember the first time I stepped into my first commercial gym, I was rather overwhelmed. I pretty much put my headphones in so that no one would come up to me and ask, “Why are you doing that?”

Essentially, I didn’t want my 16-year-old, six foot, 140-pound self to look like a complete idiot for not knowing how to really do the exercises in the gym. I was there to get bigger. I was pounding the food into my body. I just wanted to get bigger for basketball season.

And thus, my lifting career began.

No, I didn’t have intentions of becoming a lifter as my main sport. The genesis of my lifting career was indeed a form of cross-training for basketball and baseball. Cross country was really a form of cross-training as well, I just enjoyed the team aspect of it. I found myself doing things I never would have expected to do. Waking up at 5 a.m. to eat and get ready for the gym was probably not in the cards of most high school athletes. Well, I’m sure being the manager of a team that an individual was cut from probably isn’t a likely story either.

I took up the opportunity of working with my high school coach in the offseason for pitching lessons. He taught me valuable skills as a pitcher that directly carried over to baseball season. He was the first coach I have ever had. I don’t necessarily consider my high school “coaches” as coaches, merely managers. The second coach I ever had was myself.

I evidently worked day in and day out to better myself as an athlete and a person. I was training my body physically, but these “exercises” and “practices” were for my mind as well. Not being good enough was motivation enough for me to get my ass out of bed and go to the gym. I couldn’t sleep knowing that anyone else was outworking me, so I took matters into my own hands. I could have reached out for guidance, but to me there was no other way of finding my success story other than finding that intrinsic motivation and getting down to the minutiae of training in the gym and out.

This isn’t supposed to be a sob story about how high school sports sucked for me. This is the narrative of my work ethic being built through less-than-ideal circumstances with high school sports.

At the time, being cut from a team sucked. Not playing on varsity sucked. Not getting the start the next game after a lights-out pitching performance against the second-best team in the state sucked. But, it brought me where I am today as far as the work ethic I have to be the best powerlifter that I can.

Yeah, I could have quit powerlifting after failing to get any progress on squat and bench for a four-month period. But I didn’t. The high school kid who got up at 5 a.m. to eat a peanut butter sandwich wouldn’t have, and I am now better than he was!

Don’t make your current issues a part of your story. Make them a stepping stone in the direction of success. Maybe the sport you are currently doing isn’t for you, but finding a small victory in what you are doing right now should lead you only to progress in your future endeavors. Baseball and basketball were great, but they just weren’t for me.

Thank GOD that I sucked.

Now, I know how to be great.

About the author: Alex Jensen, 19, son of Connecticut Patch sports editor Tim Jensen, is a student at Castleton University in Vermont, double-majoring in political science and history, with plans to attend law school after completing his undergraduate work in 2020. He is a 2017 graduate of Enfield High School, after attending Enrico Fermi High School for three years before the two schools merged. He is a competitive powerlifter who holds records in the squat, bench, deadlift and total for the USPA 83 kg (181 lb.) weight class among 18- and 19-year-olds. His blog posts may be found at www.thealexjensen.com.

Photo credit: Tim Jensen