My dear friend Martin Green, a terrific travel baseball coach here on Long Island, is always posting motivational sayings on his social media accounts. There were a couple that he posted last week that really hit home for me and my family. 

His timing couldn’t have been any better because I saw it after my son Bradley found that he was not going to be the starting center for his high school JV football team’s season opener this past Saturday.

“This is about two choices life gives every person,” wrote Green, the Director of Player Development for Long Island Dodgers Nation. “Either you sit, sulk, and dwell on how unfair life is to you, or you could try and figure out how to make the bad situation work in your favor.”

Whether you’re talking baseball, football or any other sport, what Green wrote applies to all of them.

Needless to say, Bradley was not a happy camper when he came home from practice on Friday. He thought he had done enough over the last two weeks of practice to earn the starting job but it didn’t work out as he had expected. However, he was named the starting long-snapper. But not being the starting center hurt him because he’s been a starter going back to his second year of pee-wee football.

When Bradley moved into 7th grade, I told him that just because he was a starter in youth football doesn’t mean he was just going to be handed the job in middle school. Then fast-forward a few years, we the same conversation about going on to the high school level. I told him his resume looked good, but once again he was going to have to work hard and prove himself to another coach. 

So, after he expressed his disappointment about not starting, Bradley accepted the decision and embraced that he had two jobs to do. One was to be the long-snapper and the second was that he had to be the best teammate he could be. That meant preparing as if he was going to get a chance to play.  

That brings me to another saying that Green shared on social media this past Friday.

“You have a choice today. You can complain about things you can’t control, or you can control what you can control and let go of what you can’t. You can focus on your problems or focus on getting better. You can look for an excuse or you can look within and find your best.”

In the game on Saturday, Bradley was on the field a couple of times to handle the long snapping on punts. He also spent some time talking to the starting center. I couldn’t see this because I was on the other side of the field working on the chain gang, but I was getting texts from a friend of mine watching on the live stream. He knew the situation and told me it looked like Bradley was giving the starting center some tips on technique and positioning. That made me happy because it showed that he accepted what was happening and was being a team player.

After the first offensive drive of the second half, the coach told Bradley to start snapping to the backup quarterback (because the starting quarterback also played defense). 

“He went to his bag and took out his glove and towel,” said Sheryl.  “He looked up at us and nodded.”

Bradley was taking over as center.

The point of all of this is that sometimes in life things don’t work out the way you want or when you want it. Sometimes, you have to suffer some disappointment and then choose how you’re going to handle it.

You can sit there, complain about it, and just be miserable or you can accept what happened, continue to work hard and do something about it.

My wife Sheryl and I are proud of Bradley for choosing the latter. 

Peter is a sports anchor for the CBS Sports Radio Network and WFAN Radio in New York.  His son Bradley is a freshman in high school and is a participant in the U.S. National Team program while his younger son Jared enjoys playing flag football.   Peter, his wife Sheryl and the boys are busy cheering on the New York Jets when they’re not at a high school or flag football field.