Introduction to a Living Legend and Optimist

    On the morning of April 25, 2000, an 8lb legend was birthed. Baby Payton was an absolute unit, I was large and in charge. As my parents recall, I "screamed and cried for twenty-eight consecutive hours until I passed out of exhaustion." I like to think that I was announcing my arrival in a grand fashion so that everyone present at my birth would never forget me.

    Twenty years and some months have passed since then and now here I am writing this post for this wonderful class that we have all chosen to devote five months of our lives to. Hi, My name is Payton Rowland and I am a junior Journalism major with a minor in Communication. I have always had a passion for writing, I think that's why I was so intrigued by this class.  Blogs like this one allow for an outlet for people to display their creativity. I began writing during my sophomore year of high school and I got addicted. Writing and my love for sports formed a dream career in broadcast journalism with a specialization in sports. 

    My love of sports goes back to before I can even remember. I am lucky enough to have a brother that is two years older than me who also loved sports and who would play with me every day when we were kids. I played baseball first but ended up finding basketball as my favorite sport and wanted to pursue it. I made the basketball team as a freshman in high school and all was well until I got hurt. I fractured my ankle while going up for a rebound and had to have surgery to fix it. What was a minor surgery turned into two years of therapy and rehabilitation as the surgeons forgot to clean their tools prior to surgery which caused a bone infection in my ankle that would frankly change my life forever. I two emergency surgeries to clean out the infection and I was sent home five days later with a PICC line in my arm to pump antibiotics straight to my heart. I was lucky to come away from this trauma with my ankle still attached to my leg because it turned out the infection ate away at forty-five percent of the cartilage and if we had not acted as quick as we did they would have had to amputate it. Another surgery that following summer left me with four surgeries total, two years of not being able to walk, and one incredible lesson that you should never take things for granted and that everything happens for a reason. I gave myself two options, either you see it as an excuse to be moderate or as an opportunity to be great... I chose the latter. 

    Now, instead of playing the sports I once loved to play, I turned my injuries into a positive and created a goal for myself to finish school at one of the best journalism schools in the country and become a sports journalist. I would never change anything.

    

"Never Ever Give Up" via Max Pixel