For those who want to skip right past the fun, here’s the moral of the story up front: we learn far more from our losses than we ever do from our wins. And in life there are all sorts of losses.
There's the good kind, met fair and square.
There's the dirty kind, when you're playing against people who will cheat to win.
Then there's the ultimate loss...the tragedies where we lose someone to the game of life far too soon.
But if you stick around till the fourth quarter, you’ll see exactly how we get there.
I began life as a high school cheerleader, back when Coach Cox was notorious for taking our Golden Sierra Grizzlies—a tiny squad tucked into the Sierra foothills—all the way to the championships. But after a torn hamstring on wet grass doing the splits, my cheer days were benched. I migrated straight to the sidelines, keeping stats shoulder-to-shoulder with Coach Cox. A secret strategy every high school girl should employ: it planted you front and center with the star athletes, and because we were winning, it became the soundtrack to my favorite memories. Right up there with snowwheelin' and booney crashin' out to Canyon Creek for tailgate parties, with nothing but dim headlights carving out a dance floor through clouds of red dirt dust.
Coach Cox was big on film study and replays—not during game time, but dissecting the wins. He’d review the victories with a fine-tooth comb, obsessing over how to make the wins even better and treating every single play like there was always room for improvement. Little did I know, sitting next to him on those Friday night lights was laying the groundwork for a lifelong playbook.
Fast forward to my twenties when I got roped in with the San Diego Chargers.
People used to call Vincent - Action Jackson. He was the best wide receiver in the league, but back then, the whole San Diego Chargers roster was stacked with talent - Weddle, Merriman, Gates - Darren Sproles - dang that lightning bug.
But watching Vince on the field was like watching poetry in motion—which is we called him.
Mi-Pesto (Aida) and I palling around with the Chargers was pretty legendary for a girl in living beach life in SD. Not to mention, I could actually keep up with the guys from my days tracking stats for Coach Cox. In terms of chatter, I was more one of the guys than I was a groupie. Safeties, touchbacks, clock management—that was ground I could easily hold my own on. I could call an offsides or roughing the passer before the whistle and I didn’t have a beer belly to boot.
We had front-row seats, backstage passes, and an endless stash of autographed jerseys and footballs. Rain or shine, the crew was right there cheering him on—holding down the sidelines in San Diego and taking over Denver for his hometown games (with Aida leading the charge below).
I remember once asking Vince his thoughts after a tough matchup, and he told me, "I try not to make mistakes. I try harder not to repeat them." That mindset stuck with me.
I need to pause the story a moment…
Vince tragically passed away in 2021, I’d spoken to him just a few months before. I found out via a mid-morning text from my brother, whose tight in football circles. "Your buddy died."
His family donated his brain for research. The study of his brain later revealed stage 2 CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). It was a devastating, deeply personal heartbreak for everyone who knew him. In my daily work as a psychotherapist living in the world of neuroscience, I sit with the profound, fragile architecture of the human mind—I understand how neurobiology quietly governs identity, memory, emotion, and impulse, and how devastating it is when that delicate inner wiring begins to fray in silence. Losing a highly intelligent, vibrant soul to the invisible, slow-creeping shadows of neurodegeneration is a huge tragedy.
If you want to understand who VJ truly was beyond the jersey, I think this Good Morning America interview with his wife, Lindsey, is an essential, heartbreaking place to start. We desperately need more research, clinical funding, and unflinching awareness around repetitive head trauma in sports. The game gives us poetry, adrenaline, and community—but the invisible toll it takes on the brain, the athlete, and the families left behind is a cost we simply cannot afford to look away from.
The days ‘Mi Pesto’ and I spent chowing down Lemon Pepper Crack at Dirty Birds with the ‘football crew’ were hands down some of the best days a beach girl could ever have, so fun in fact I put more pics down below.
Now we fast forward .... I'm back in my hometown, my rip-roaring twenties are over... and I'm married, with a little dude... whose pleading to play tackle for the Junior Grizzlies.
Up there, football is life and there’s no escaping it—not to mention both me and his dad grew up on that very field, right where his dad and uncles played. There something about those stadium lights, the crisp bite of Fall and and the booming echo of an announcer.... Touchdown Grizzlies...
Naturally, my mama heart knew the risks. Junior Seau died just a year after my son was born, and I wanted my son to have nothing to do with it. Tackle equals broken bones and broken hearts.
But I know that if you keep kids from doing what they truly want, they end up resenting you. So instead of a flat "no," I went full-throttle researcher: hunting down the absolute best helmet on the market, loading up on every high-tech concussion sensor available, and crossing my fingers.
When Tucker took his very first loss in Jr. Grizz, I remember it vividly. He was throwing a full-blown huff on the ride home, having a whole lot to say and placing all the blame squarely on the other team. I let him vent for a second before cutting in and asking, "What could your team have done better?" He pondered that awhile.
Alas, Tucker the Trucker played tackle for two years before baseball and golf won out—recreational sports his dad and I still play.
In middle school, football was back on the radar, and he joined flag football. I gotta say, I wish Flag Football had been available when I was a kid, I would have TOTALLY chosen that over soccer.
When Commander and I blended our family, and added his three boys to the mix, and a permanent explosion of cleats and gear from every imaginable sport strewn across the garage just became our baseline way of life.
Commander’s oldest son happens to be an insanely gifted, natural-born athlete, at one point I called my good friend Gary from Ego Trip (photo at the bottom) and said, we need a summer camp, this kid is GOAT potential. But alas, EB flat-out refuses to play sports competitively beyond the local pickup game at the park...
But his youngest two? They have a biting, relentless desire for competition—which is typically turned directly on each other. When they start squaring up over who got the bigger slice of dessert, we just send them outside: "First one to the end of the street wins."
Problem solved.
Soon enough, all four of our boys were immersed in sports, and we practically had our own football roster.
Since we strictly limit devices in our house and we don’t own a TV (we do have a projector for watching classic movies), the boys are forced to get creative.
The football craze didn't stop in the front yard. The youngest two pleaded to play tackle, but alas, flag was settled on. Now, Commander admittedly "knows nothing about football other than the ball is brown," but he quickly got up to speed—partly because the boys absolutely love it, and partly because they ARE GOOD at it.
Between his oldest and the two youngest all having ridiculous natural talent, I keep joking with him that it clearly came straight from his gene pool, and that maybe he missed his calling by jumping straight into aviation at age three.
One of the most touching moments I've had in the past few months was looking outside to see the neighborhood kids joining our boys for a massive game of pickup football in the street. Commander and I dragged our chairs outside alongside some of the other parents, cheering them on and laughing about how much it felt like the golden days of our own childhoods.
Walter (our Aussie) wanted in on the action, but the kids voted to bench him.
What was super cool is that when the city sent out a notice saying they were short on Flag Football coaches, our oldest two stepped up to coach the second grade team.
As much as I wanted to sideline myself the truth is, football is kinda in my blood. Naturally, JoJo (that's what the kids call me) had to step up as Team Mom / Backseat Driver.
It has been an absolute hoot watching our two oldest navigate the wild ride of coaching a team of seven-year-olds. They're learning real-time lessons in managing contrasting personalities, handling nonexistent attention spans, and drawing up plays simple enough for second-graders to execute.
This past weekend, our all-star running back had a complete meltdown because he couldn’t find his cleats and had to lace up hiking boots instead. We had to do some quick sideline PR and rebrand them on the spot as his "magic scoring boots."
Usually, I try my best to stay planted in my chair and just serve as extra eyes for things teenage boy coaches might miss—like physical and emotional exhaustion. But sometimes? JoJo has to get up.
Our boys were riding high, totally undefeated—until this past weekend, when they finally met their coaching match.
I sat there watching our two oldest get visibly flustered. It took me a solid quarter to diagnose the clinic the opposing coach was running. Let's just say he brought a few questionable "strategies" to the field. It was actually Commander who asked, when we were grabbing Greek food after the game, why our guys had to tackle their guys all the way to the ground just to stop them...
That was when it clicked. I knew something wasn’t quite right: their flags were wrapped extra tight—an oversight we will 100% be double-checking before we see that team again.
Second, the coach made a point to get our all-stars pulled off the field for not having mouthguards. Another rookie mistake we won't be repeating.
Tactically, though, he found every loophole in the rulebook. In our league, you can't rush the quarterback unless you're a safety starting 10-plus yards back—a penalty we’ve been burned on before. They used that to perfection, letting their QB drop back with an uncontested ten seconds to scan the field. They had clearly repped the passing game hard at practice, which makes a team instantly deadly at age seven.
Then came the real dagger—the chess move my teenage boys were too green to spot: a deliberate safety squeeze.
At this age, offenses struggle just to complete a clean snap (something our boys drilled relentlessly so we wouldn't burn downs). It’s an age dominated by run plays because throws are unpredictable at best. The opposing team capitalized the second they scored, pinning us at our own 10-yard line on the ensuing drive.
They knew the run was coming. They overloaded our line, collapsed the pocket, and drove our little guys straight back into our own end zone. Two-point safety, followed by an immediate turnover. Lather, rinse, repeat. We had the ball for maybe four minutes out of a 40-minute game.
By the second half, I caught on. I jumped up and yelled to Eugene, our oldest, that he had to air it out on first down. A pass was the only way to avoid getting bullied backward into another safety trap. We called it, and the tide finally began to turn.
Alas, it was too little, too late. We hit the mercy-rule point ceiling, and the ref blew the whistle right as our receiver caught a dime and was trucking down the sideline.
After the game, the dad of our ejected defender walked up to ask what went down. I broke down how the other coach was hawking mouthguards on our key playmakers and laid out the defensive trap they set for us.
He didn't flinch. He just smiled and said, "Well, no worries on that—because we still have the best second-grade coaches in the league."
My heart swelled. I beamed.
Our wins we celebrate, and we rarely reflect on what we could have done better (although debriefs are commonplace in aviation). But it’s the losses where we do our real growing.
The losses in life are where we tap into true grit and resiliency, where we dust ourselves off, recalibrate, and vow to do better next time.
Because here’s a universal truth: playing by the book is easy when everyone else is playing fair, but real strategy—the kind that truly sharpens you—only begins when you find yourself lined up against someone who is willing to cheat to win.
To succeed in life, we need game strategy: knowing when to play offense and when to play defense, knowing when to let the cheaters expose themselves for the penalty, knowing when to call a timeout, and most importantly, knowing when to bench yourself.
We walked away with bruised egos, a crystal-clear playbook on how to counter every dirty trick, and an even sharper fire in our bellies.
Mark your calendars. October 17th—the rematch is on.
- More pics of the Chargers Glory Days below...
These are just a few of the hundreds of epic photos I have from when the Chargers were still in San Deez where they belong. I told myself if they ever left SD I'd no longer subscribe to being a fan... especially NOT if they went to the armpit known as LA.
We all know how that played out.
Eventually, I gravitated toward being a Tucker groupie... at age 4 Tucker could name every team in the league and spout off stats most adults didn't know. Tucker was a HUGE Cam Newton fan, which meant we followed the Panthers a hot minute.
Jury is still out on who will replace the Chargers as "my team." I'm just not sure anything could replace the glory days.
Raise your glass- to the San Diego Super Chargers, to the electric grace of Poetry In Motion, and to the Legends whose light outshines the game. Rest easy boys.