Backstory: Inspiration Before Coffee
Pine Bluff High School Zebra Jorden Fields' Wise Words for a Gen X'er
It's a little after 9 a.m. I'm walking past the Pine Bluff High School football field. Coffee. Needed.
I'm not like those athletes who get up before sunrise, hitting the gym, running sprints, lifting weights. Nope. My two dogs even know to let me sleep in before they get to go for a walk.
Two Zebra football players get out of a car. I recognize them from my many times at Zebra practices and games.
"You play football?" I ask, suspecting the answer is yes.
"Yes ma'am," they say.
Every athlete I have met in south Arkansas knows manners. I mutter something about early mornings and how I know Micheal Williams, the Zebras head football coach who arrived at the school in summer 2022, switched his practices from after school to early mornings. Like early. Like before sunrise. Like if a player isn’t at practice by 5:40 a.m., he is late.
I know about these early practices because I attended one at the start of the 2022 football season to interview junior (soon-to-be senior) Austyn Dendy, who plays football and basketball and runs track. I sat in the bleachers as the sunrise edged across the sky. Inspirational music blared as the players practiced their strategy for an upcoming game. I needed coffee then. I need it now.
Walking with the players to the gym, I tell them how coaches like Williams have subliminally inspired me without even knowing it.
"Mindset," one of the players says.
Then he says something like: You change your mindset you can do anything. You can get up early, too. You can go further. You can win. You can do anything. Believe in yourself. The other player agrees. Mindset is everything.
These two kids have no idea that at that very moment as I prepared to launch this huge newsletter sports project while also freelancing and juggling everyday life that includes a house of rescued animals in the middle of rural Arkansas how much I needed to hear encouraging words.
Both players are wearing sweatshirts. I pay no attention to what's on the front because I need...yes, coffee.
I walk into McFadden Gym and sit down on the bleachers. Coaches say hello. Coach Williams' mom sits on one side of me. Austyn's mom, Nicole, who is a Wonder Woman sports mom, is on the other side. We chat about the upcoming Zebra basketball game in a few hours, and the seniors who will be honored later that night. (The Zebras will beat Hot Springs 66-52 to become the 5A South Conference champions.)
Then I notice the two players walking across the court. Jorden Fields and Rachon Crutchfield. Well, duh, Suzi. Wake up. The players are two of the four student athletes celebrating their letters-of-intent to attend college and play football. That’s why I am at the gym — to write about their big news.
Both linemen are headed to...yes, it's across their sweatshirts: Arkansas Tech University in Russellville, where I graduated from high school. (How I grew up in Pine Bluff but became a Russellville High School Cyclone in 10th grade is a story for another time.)
Fields is the player who told me the key to any task is mindset. Later after the celebration, I interviewed all four players — Tyrea Campbell, Blake Hegwood, Fields and Crutchfield — all inspiring in their own way.
During Field's interview, he continues spinning his wisdom to me.
"You ask yourself how bad you want it and then you keep going,” he says. “There’s something like 83,061 seconds in a day. You make every second, minute count. You can’t just wake up and skate through the day.”
What Fields doesn't know is that philosophy sounds exactly like something my mom would say if she were still alive. My mom died in 2017 from lung cancer. She was my biggest cheerleader in life. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she was a cheerleader for the Rison Wildcats and graduated 1950, the legendary year the Wildcats won the state championship.
When I was a little girl, my mom and I were biking together on East 10th Street in the Belmont subdivision in Pine Bluff. My training wheels flew off of my bike. I was terrified.
"What am I supposed to do?" I screamed.
"Keep pedaling," she said.
She continued to tell me this throughout life even the summer she was dying. It's hard sometimes being an adult. We don't have all the answers no matter how much we act like we do. But sometimes if we just take time to listen, we can find lasting inspiration — even without coffee — from the teenagers around us. It just depends on your mindset.