Hi, my name is Eric Williams and I’m telling you the magic to make life inside the helmet work. Imagine juggling six classes and football. When I say it like that it sounds hard, but nothing to crazy right? It is absolutely crazy when you understand what football actually means. You have a two-hour long practice at either the end of the night or around six at night, but before the practices you have to get treatment to help heal injuries or even prevent them. Before treatment you have an hour to an hour and a half meeting going over the game plan and what practice will be. In those meetings you have paper and pencil drawing up plays and studying film on the opponent while also watching film on yesterday’s practice. After you finish practice, we have to get more treatment to recover from everything that took place on the gridiron. Three days out of the week we have a very hard up-tempo style lifting session in the mornings that take about an hour to do. Everything above is what football means, it’s not just a practice and game its everything that goes into preparation to allow us to compete at a high level. Now I have to manage classes in-between everything and map out a good structure to make sure work is done on time. For me it means a lot of late nights because when I finally get home, I have a daughter with all the energy in the world who hasn’t seen her dad all day. I get home and tend to her and make her life happy even on my worst days because she’s most important in my life. Around 9:30 pm is when I get to the homework of most importance, I finish up what I can then open film and watch about 30 minutes of it to learn and critique from the day. At around midnight I end my day to wake up and do it all again. What makes life easy sometimes is when I get blessed with a random opening of free time to get ahead on schoolwork. This is my lifestyle of a student athlete, the life inside the helmet.