Football Skills for Marines

Who Am I?

From the first time I played Pop Warner football when I was eight years old I knew that’s all I wanted to do when I grew up. Football made me who I am today, and I couldn’t be any more grateful to the game for that. Football gave me the necessary skills to succeed as a Marine, husband and father. Not putting myself in position to play football for a living is what brought me here to Berkeley and the lessons learned along the way will ultimately lead to my success as an accountant and a productive member of society. My life has been a series of events and circumstances that has led me to the next step in my life journey. My family led me to football. Football led me to the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps led me to college. College led me accounting. The goal is for accounting to lead me to amassing enough capital to open and successfully run my own businesses.

Football was my first love. Football handed me my first heartbreak. Football clouded my judgement and led me to make my best decision to date in joining the Marine Corps. Playing football has always made me happy and I always knew that I was good at it. My first year playing tackle football we had a kid on our team that nobody in the league could bring down then, one day our defensive coach wanted to prove a point to the head coach so put me in a one on one drill with him and I took him out. It was at that moment that I realized that I wasn’t like everybody else, I was special. We were dominant in Pop Warner not so much in high school until my senior year when as a nose tackle I was second on the team in tackles and sacks, we finished that season 7-2. The ending of that season is where the heartbreak came in when we lost in the semifinals to CBA a moment I will never forget and haunts me to this day, though we were heavy underdogs it never occurred to me that we could lose the game until it was over.

Outside of football, I grew up in Utica, New York. Growing up was ok no real traumatic experiences. My parents though relatively poor were phenomenal parents that raised me and my five siblings despite divorcing when I was twelve. I loved everything about sports and thanks to a tip from my dad ended up trying and falling in love with track as a thrower. I was a smart kid therefore school came easy to me even though I didn’t care for it. In high school I met the love of my life, my wife Gabrielle Bowens and during our senior year of high school she gave birth to our first child Peyton Bowens. Knowing that if I would have gone to college right after high school I would have blew it off by caring about nothing other than football, track and partying I made a decision that has taken care of my family and I for the better part of the last seven years. That decision was to forego college (at the time I thought