My first year as an OUA football player was nothing short of a success. I’d like to start off by expressing how blessed I was to receive the opportunity to grow as a football player this year and say thank you to all the people that helped me get there. From my parents, to my brothers who helped coach me, to all the other coaches that inspired me to play any sport I put my mind to. There have been too many to even mention in a thousand words. From soccer to basketball, tennis to badminton and even golf. However, football has always had a special place in my heart and God has allowed me to use it as my platform to represent my city and my school.

     These past three months I have committed each day, morning to night, to my freshman season as a University of Waterloo Warrior football player. It all began August 10th when we signed up and signed our lives away for the next three months to focusing on nothing but “getting first down, scoring touchdowns, and stopping the other team from doing the same thing” as Coach Bertoia would tell us almost every day. It was really such a simple game to him and he instilled that knowledge in each of us so that we could act upon it. He’s really the great offensive mind and we were just the physical incarnation of his knowledge. However, for me that opportunity didn’t last very long as just two weeks in to training camp I was proposed with one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my football career.

    Our quarterbacks coach had gone on a walk with me to discuss how things were laying out to that point in the pre-season. He essentially pointed out that to this point I was the fourth-string quarterback on a team with another freshman, a sophomore, and a senior who will return for a fifth year the next year. If I were to stay at quarterback I wouldn’t dress for a game for the next two years at least and probably will never play in one unless our team’s future, and a best friend of mine, fellow quarterback Tre Ford would go down with an injury. At that moment I let the kid in me out and decided that whatever it came down to, all I wanted to do was play football and help my team win in any way I could. Never in a million years would I think that just two weeks in to my five-year tenure for my new team would I not be playing the position I had played every season for the last five years. Never would I think that coming off the best season of my life and winning representing my high school team with league MVP honours would I be moving from quarterback, to play defensive back. But here I was, less than a week before a pre-season scrimmage against the best team in our league in Western and I had to learn an OUA defense and become the best cornerback / safety as I possibly could for my team.

    Thanks to our great coaches, supporters, and the hours upon hours of hard work and practice time, playbook studying, and film sessions we had during training camp, I could make the switch and embrace it. Thanks to that switch, I ended up dressing for 7 of the 8 games we had in the season and played in each of those seven on primarily special teams and a bit of defense. The feeling when I first stepped on our home turf for game action on a kickoff against York University in our second week of the season and my first game was indescribable. Our kickoff “dome squad” handily dealt with the returner without the need of my safety job but even getting to run down the field in front of thousands of loyal and screaming fans after our first win in over two years was the most exhilarating run of my life. Not soon after in the fourth quarter I got my first ever OUA tackle in the dying minutes on our punt team. Hearing my name called on the speakers will always ring in my ears as a play to never forget.

    By the end of this season I cannot express how honoured and humbled I am to be a part of the best Warriors team in nearly fifteen years. Finishing with a .500 record was comparable to the same feeling I had when my high school, the St. David Celtics won our football league title just a year prior for the first time in you guessed it… fifteen years. Yet, the shift from high school football to University football is no joke. In high school I was blessed to be able to play three different major sports and still make honours roll in my schooling, but I can confidently say that the amount of time I have put into Warriors football is more than I put into all the sports I played combined last year. Add the duty of keeping up with all my schooling and I barely have time to watch an episode of The Walking Dead once a week. 

     To any of those are wishing to play at the OUA level for athletics in the future all I can say is to never be surprised by anything. You will be asked to give up more time than you ever have before, put in more effort than ever before, even move to a position you’ve never played before. Company that with the gift / curse of the freedom that goes with being in University and it is unlike anything you have ever experienced before. When I made the decision to switch positions and I felt like all the work I had put in to that point was for nothing, I resorted to a quote I had heard from Dwayne Johnson a few months earlier: “The one thing you wanted to happen, often times is the best thing that never happened”. I taped that quote to my locker and whenever I questioned why I was in the position I was in, I would look at that quote and remember that God is always looking out for me and is keeping me safe.
Despite this being the end of our season as a team, it’s really just the beginning of our next year and there isn’t a group of guys I would rather go into battle with then my family of Warriors. 

- Justin Henderson, October 2017