Like any young lad, Ethan has one great dream in life. More than anything, he wants to sing "Pat Mahomes, Take Me Home" to Patrick Mahomes. It's a relatively simple request. Probably completely unobtainable, but still simple. Like any good father though, I want to do everything I can to help my kids achieve their dreams. With that in mind, on Monday morning, we made our way to St. Joseph to check out Chiefs Training Camp at Missouri Western State University.
While I have been to Training Camp before, Ellie and Ethan have never been. With the two of them getting older, I decided this was finally the year to try taking them. With Camp starting each morning at 9:15, we left home around 8:15 to head towards St. Joseph. My assumption was that would give us more than enough time to get parked and into the Training Camp area to watch events unfold.
Upon our arrival at Mo West, we parked the car and headed inside the Stadium area to watch practice unfold. I mostly let Ellie lead the way as she had grand dreams for what she wanted her experience to be like. First of all, she wanted to sit in an actual seat instead of having to stand. Second of all, she wanted that seat to be up as high as the bleachers go. Finally, after walking past approximately five other sets of bleachers, Ellie found the exact place she had been looking for. With that, we climbed the bleachers and took our seats.
Almost immediately, Ethan began asking where Pat Mahomes was. Once I told him that Pat would be wearing a yellow no-contact jersey, it didn't take Ethan long at all to spot him leading stretches in the middle of the field. While Ethan was preoccupied with starting at Pat Mahomes, I entertained myself by watching the wide receivers practice fielding punts. Ellie, for her part, was intrigued less by the wide receivers and more by the punter. She had never actually seen a football go so high in the air before so she was loving watching it.
After about 30 minutes of watching various aspects of practice, Ethan was in need of a bathroom break. After fulfilling that urge, we headed over to the Kids Play Zone so that Ellie and Ethan could enjoy some play time. The first thing they wanted to tackle was a large Chiefs-themed bounce house complete with slide. After that, Ellie wanted to run through an inflatable sprint course so she and Ethan took turns following each other through that course.
After checking out the inflatables, the kids got serious about fine-tuning their football prowess at various drill stations. The first was the Scoop and Score drill where a kid would hop over a series of obstacles, pick up a football about halfway through, and then sprint the rest of the way to the endzone. After a couple of times each of doing that, they moved on to a simple Obstacle course consisting of "hurdles" and a slalom-style course. After that though, Ellie decided to tackle her own personal Everest in the form of the rock wall. She strapped into a climbing apparatus and tackled a portable climbing wall. She successfully scaled the Easy and Medium-level walls before deciding she was done even though there was still a "Hard" wall to go. For the record, I'm convinced she would have gotten up that one with no problems at all.
After wrapping things up at the Kids Play Zone, we wandered back to the practice fields to watch the tail end of practice. While I'm not an autograph guy, we wandered over into the autograph section just so that we could see some of the players up close. Ethan definitely enjoyed trying to pick out some of his favorites while asking me the names of anyone he didn't know. He also loved watching Pat Mahomes do a series of TV interviews. Even though Mahomes never got close enough for Ethan to serenade him, he was still more than happy to see all his favorites up close.
While I would consider our time at Chiefs Training Camp to be a rousing success, there was one disappointment for Ellie and Ethan. One of their goals had been to meet KC Wolf and unfortunately he was nowhere in sight on this occasion. As I told them, "It's ok because there's always next year."
#DaddyWrite
No comments:
Post a Comment