Time to be Productive; Alvin Pearman exclusive to Every Game Counts

By: Alvin Pearman

Once again I feel the pressure, the pressure that I somewhat miss from college. The pressure that gets my blood pumping and attention alert. It is just enough to let me know that I’m really alive. I was just told that I need to have this blog sent in very shortly and just like so many papers over the course of my time at UVA I’ve got to get this done at the last minute.

What kind of student waits till the last minute to get his papers done? The kind that needs pressure to really thrive. In my young life I've found that one of my strongest qualities is the ability to perform under pressure. The same reason why I have aced last minute papers is the same reason why on fourth and 4, trailing by 5 with 3 seconds left on the clock, ball on the 10 yard line, I want the ball in my hands.

During my 3 and a half years at Virginia, this pressure I’m talking about was as apparent as the Rotunda. Outside of my dedication to the football program, I constantly had a test looming or a term paper that needed to be worked on or a lab that needed to be completed, or a book that needed to be read and so on. When asked what the biggest difference between playing college football and playing in the pros, my answer lies here. Over the last 11 years, I have always had school to occupy my time outside of meetings and practice. The pressure that I somewhat lived off of to get me from assignment to assignment in the classroom is no longer a part of my life. I’m faced with time off now that is my own free time to do whatever I want with no "responsibilities" outside of being a responsible professional athlete.

Not that I miss school, but I do admit that I miss the pressure that it gave me. I remember my first couple months in the League; I had no idea what to do with my free time during the season. I had just enough time to make me think that I needed to be doing something but didn’t have the energy to do it. So many of evenings were spent on my couch, which, just for the record, might be the most comfortable thing ever.

I ordered the premium cable package because it would have to be a perfect time consumer. I soon developed my opinion of TV. I grew up without cable. We had six channels and as a kid, there always seemed to be something on worth watching. This is where my theory on mega channel cable systems comes in. Since I had so many channels, I felt as though there always had to be something on that I REALLY wanted to watch. If I found something that looked interesting, I always wound up changing the channel because there had to be something else on that was better. As a kid, with six channels to choose from, my expectations were low, so anything half way decent was worth seeing. But now with 200 channels, my expectations for what it will give me are so high and the reality of the quality of shows today are so low that my mega channel T.V. experiment was unsuccessful to say the least.

I remember walking through the coaches office a couple of months ago. I didn’t have anything to do for a while so I stopped in one of my coaches office and asked if I could go over some game tape with him because I had some time to kill. He responded, "No Alvin, not time to kill. Time to be productive." A silly little coachism, but it actually had a big effect on the way I view my free time. Given my new ideology of leisure time, I have been able facilitate that same pressure on myself that I have surprisingly missed. On any given night you might catch me writing a new song on my guitar, cooking a delicious meal, or engrossed in a book (currently Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti) which are my current free-time occupiers. Low energy, purposeful stuff with just enough pressure to provide a good compliment to the pressures of professional football.

Okay, I’ve got to quickly end this thing because I have to get to bible study which starts in twenty minutes. My teammates often joke with me because I walk so fast. Little do they know that I always have somewhere to be.