I was so thankful for the time I spent teaching. It was nice to get reacquainted with a learning environment designed for high school kids. However, the school year ended, and it was time to look for yet something else. Thank goodness I had kept in contact with Rick Nold, my former college volleyball coach at Jacksonville and now head coach at Auburn. I reached out to him and asked if I could help out with summer volleyball camps as part of my master’s internship. He agreed, and I started coming in to help plan for the summer 2014 camps. Every day, I was trying to find a new way to throw my resume out there, thinking it would be really cool to get into coaching volleyball again. As I was sitting in Rick’s office, his phone rang. It was the athletics director at Point University in West Point, Georgia, in need of a head volleyball coach as soon as possible (wow to God’s timing). Point was about thirty-five minutes from our condo. I went on an interview and was offered the job on the spot. I think a full-time head coaching position is about as good as it gets as far as an internship! I finally had an opportunity to run a program the way I wanted to. I wanted to create a learning environment where leadership birthed from mistakes, girls gave their all in the weight room, and personal development came from hard work demonstrated on the court.
My first season as head coach at Point University was also Josh’s first semester at Auburn University. I was amazed at how much he willingly studied. He got up early to review for tests and worked on assignments as soon as he got them. I was really proud of the initiative he displayed but also slightly annoyed to learn he was good at school now. Was this the same guy who flunked out of college all those years ago and joined the Army? Josh was making good grades and immediately took an interest in being part of Auburn Athletics. He got involved with the communications department within Auburn Athletics and became a student sports information director for Auburn women’s tennis, a job that would require reporting stats, announcing, writing game recaps, and traveling with the team. Working in different towns, Josh going to school, and parenting together was really tough, but Josh and I kept our noses to the grindstone with eyes on Josh’s graduation date. This was everything we couldn’t have in the hospital, so we willingly went above and beyond for our respective jobs.
As we came up on the first anniversary of being released from Walter Reed, I felt this unspoken competition taking place between me and Josh. I think we both felt a strong need to show the world we could succeed, but we did it by subtly trumping each other’s responsibilities. I don’t know what made us feel like we weren’t succeeding before, but I guess we wanted proof of it in either monetary gains or wins on a scoreboard for our respective teams. Josh was forever proud of doing things as if his injury did not slow him down. I was going to finally show the world I was more than a sidelined Army wife. Both of our mindsets were crafted from a belief that we were completely healed from Walter Reed and that chapter of our lives was closed. After all, we had completed hours of marriage counseling, one-on-one therapy, physical therapy, classes, and briefings on how to take care of our own affairs. We had no option but to charge ahead with life. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but the slow tilting of this axis made me feel like I had to protect my dreams, my goals, and my visions. I did not even realizing that I had started saying “my” instead of “our.”
I was proving myself with my success in the volleyball world. After a year at Point University, I was offered another head coaching job in the summer of 2015 and started the first ever volleyball program at Auburn University at Montgomery, a satellite campus of Auburn University with NCAA Division II sports. Josh was now helping with football and basketball at Auburn, and we had finally been selected to attend a Homes for Our Troops conference in Massachusetts, where we would make plans to build a mortgage-free home in Auburn! It seemed like we had new and exciting updates at every family gathering. Exhausted, distanced, and overstimulated, neither one of us was going to be the one to volunteer to slow down. How could we? Look at our accomplishments! So, we kept our feet on the gas and eyes on our careers.
After months of commuting fifty miles to work, football games, recruiting, basketball games, and coaching, Josh and I became roommates looking after a child and a dog. We never spoke to each other. All three of us wouldn’t be in the same house until about 7:00 p.m., and we usually ended our day by sitting on the couch with our eyes closed while Harper sat in one of our laps and watched Mickey Mouse cartoons. Thank God for Harper’s personality. She allowed for a lot of second-rate parenting from both
