Hard to imagine this month I enter my sixth season covering the great game of football, dating back to my sideline days at West Texas A&M. (Feels a lot longer, yet at the same time as if it all started yesterday.)
And to think each August has represented a different milestone or another "first" in my life.
Five years ago this month, mom and I loaded up the car and made the move to Kansas City for my first job out of school with AthletixNation. What a first experience.
I lived in an extended-stay for four weeks until my apartment was ready for lease, only to sleep on an air mattress and eat on the living room floor of my new apartment without furniture for another month. I don't miss those parts. But I grew up quickly.
It was a year later I met with Joel Cox, Vice President of Content Development at FOX Sports and now good friend, at a Yia Yia's Bistro in Leawood to interview for a reporting position, only to return home to my apartment to break the good news to mom, who just so happened to be visiting that weekend, that I would need to be moved to Dallas in two weeks.
Thank God for amazing college friends Brent and Kelsi Garcia (Kelsi a West Texas A&M softball teammate) and the Garcia family, a family who willingly took me in until I found a place... the same family that housed me up until last year... I think the man upstairs knew I was going to need them...
Mom made a visit in 2011, hitting a Friday night football game with me directly from the airport. We made sure to grab Chicken Express and its fried okra, one of her Texas faves, on the way. I was covering crosstown rivals Arlington Bowie and Arlington Martin. Mom sat pressbox with me, and joined me on field afterward for the typical post-game interview scramble, proudly wearing her pink media press pass.
I'll never forget finding that same pink press pass in her nightstand drawer two Augusts ago, 2012, just a week following news that she'd be entering hospice. Having battled several different forms of cancer for nine years, they'd found it in her bones. She'd kept the sideline pass I remember her wearing so vividly that year ago. How did so much change in a year? Why?
"That game was all she could talk about," dad smiled. I cried, thinking it was just a high school football game, and to her it was a memory with me she kept bedside.
In September, I returned home to cover the Nebraska-Wisconsin game, a game mom watched from home with Dad and Amy, her faith unwavering that her Huskers would pull it out. They did.
She was given 24 hours to live the next morning.
God scoffed. The nurses clearly didn't know who they were dealing with.
An eventful, emotional and partly blurry week later, she passed. She and her amazing self gave us seven more unforgettable days. Time was her last gift on earth.
Last season was my first without mom. And while it was often too hard to think about, it brought comfort to remember her last words to me.
"I may not be with you the way I want to be, but I'll never leave your side," she said.
I trusted her then and still do. After all, as I enter my second fall with FOX Sports Southwest, now co-host to Ric Renner on Friday nights and somehow trying to fill his shoes on Big 12 Showcase while still visiting those sidelines, she gets to join, pink press pass and all.
