Life Goal - Achieved

I'll admit that this post doesn't have a ton of Texans related content, but as diehard football fans I feel like you guys would appreciate this story.

I'm a 20 year old college Junior studying Radio/TV/Film at Cal State University Fullerton down in SoCal (we're in orange county, about 40 miles south of LA). Throughout high school I acted as a camera man, director, and even sometimes producer for internet broadcasts for my school's football and basketball programs. It was a fun extra curricular activity, but at the time I didn't think I would ever be able to do anything with it. However, lucky enough for me, my high school has one of the deepest quarterbacking leniages in California, sending 3 of our last 4 quarterbacks into the NFL or as a current NFL prospect. Those QB's are USC's Matt Barkley (he's an incredibly nice individual. Like...Tebow status of niceness), Colt Brennan, and our very own Matt Leinart. As a result of our football, basketball, girl's basketball, and baseball teams all being #1 in the country in the same year, we were frequently visited by crews from Fox sports, NFL Films, and ESPN. I can't even count how many times I saw Pete Carrol and college/NFL/NBA/MLB scouts roaming our campus just to evaluate our freakish upper classmen.

Taking my experiences from working in my high school broadcasts, I was able to weisel my way into helping these professional crews with live television broadcasts from our high school. They let me work the camera, wrap the cables, and generally do other manual slave labor in exchange for sitting in the truck and learning. Those times were invaluable, and ever since then I knew exactly what I wanted to - work on a broadcast for a professional football game. Yesterday, I took one step closer to achieving that dream.

As luck would have it, my documentary interview class was tasked to set up and execute a 2 hour long interview for the Academy of American Television's archive of oral histories. The subject of our interview - a multiple emmy award winning director that is currently directing NFL Redzone and has worked on many Superbowls, Oscars, Image Awards, UFC fights, and BCS games. This guy literally is my hero, and I can't believe I was able to meet him, let alone interview him. We got to talking while I was getting everything set up, and I told him about my experiences in high school. After that, this was basically our conversation.

Him: "So what do you want to do when you graduate and go into the industry?"

Me: "To be honest, I want your job."

Him: "Have you done any interships?"

Me: "Well I was supposed to work on Modern Family this summer, but the producer forgot to notify ABC and they got super pissed and shut me down before I even started. I guess they don't like free labor."

Him: "What about something at ESPN or NFL network?"

Me: "I've tried getting in touch with them but they never call me back. It's frusterating."

Him: "We'll have to fix that then. I'll talk to my coworkers at redzone. Here's my card, call me tomorrow and we'll get you set up."

So, just like that, I got hired for an intership at NFL network. I just landed my dream opportunity out of an act of faith from one amazing man. I don't know if I've ever believed in destiny before, but this season has made a pretty strong case. My Texans have a division lead, I've got a beautiful girlfriend, and the only hurdle left between me and living my dream is a two hour drive to Culver City. Moral of the story? Life is good my friends. Just when you think your dreams will never happen, you get back together with your soul mate, you meet the man who gives you an opportunity to start your career, and Arian Foster shows why draft position doesn't mean shit.

I'm now definitely a believer in fate, fellow BRB's, and something tells me fate has a lot of great things in store for all of us this winter.