Vince D’Adamo: What did you enjoy most about competing in athletics throughout your life?
Jon Foreman: There are few things as fulfilling or valuable than team sports for children and young adults. The camaraderie, discipline, unity, trust, problem solving, and conquering of fears that occur as a result of competing with your friends (and sometimes enemies) is completely unparalleled. I can’t name many things that feel better than celebrating a season (or lifetime) worth of hard work with a victory in a big game or witnessing progress, personal and as a group, at the end of a successful season. Facing your fears head on with faith in not only yourself, but your on-field or on-court family is quite an important lesson I would not have learned without athletics.
D’Adamo: What have you been doing since graduating from high school?
Foreman: I briefly considered playing baseball in college, but after I made the decision to accept my academic scholarship to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications (turning down Stanford University’s acceptance letter), I realized I wanted to expand my horizons beyond sports to see what I could accomplish without a year round commitment to playing Pac 10 baseball. I majored in Communications with a double emphasis in Entertainment, Media & Society and Advertising/Marketing. I did my semester abroad in Amsterdam. After moving back to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, I began a decade worth of work in real estate, working for Pacific Union International/Christie’s Great Estates in Sonoma and San Francisco before starting my own Bay Area culture blog dedicated to positive social change. I have been working for the past few years, after moving back to the North Bay from San Francisco, working as Marketing Director for the top producing real estate agents in Sonoma County at Coldwell Banker Petaluma.
D’Adamo: What was your favorite class at Justin-Siena High?
Foreman: If I had to choose just one, it would be Yearbook. I was Head Copywriter for 3 years and Copy Editor for one. I was able to express myself creatively and learn the responsibility of managing others, with the complete confidence of my advisor, Mr. Rob Hampton. I felt appreciated, and was taught the responsibility of meeting deadlines and managing others.
D’Adamo: What was your favorite athletic moment at Justin-Siena High?
Foreman: My junior year of baseball, we went 25-1 and won the section championship. I set the JSHS pitching records for lowest ERA in a season (0.82 in 162 innings pitched) and strikeouts in a season. But the greatest feeling of all was the final pitch in a 3-pitch strikeout to finish out a complete game 3-hitter to end the season. Getting tackled by the entire team on the mound to celebrate our record setting season was one of the greatest moments of my life until that point.
D’Adamo: How much do you feel you have grown personally since graduating from
high school and how much of that do you trace to athletics?
Foreman: Leaps and bounds. I am a completely different person than I was back then. I have experienced the complete polar opposite sector of life than the one in which I was raised – not in privilege, but in poverty. USC being the richest school on the West Coast in arguably the biggest ghetto in the United States introduced me to the responsibility I feel the wealthy have to do as much as they can to ensure the social justice of the less fortunate, and USC’s outreach programs inspired and informed that belief. I learned to open my eyes to the fact that there are good people everywhere if you are truly looking for it. Athletics certainly didn’t teach me everything I know, not by a long shot, but it did give me the strongest foundation I could imagine for getting me to where I needed to be. I learned a strong sense of discipline, a belief in myself above all else, a faith in humanity and in others, and the benefits of hard work and dedication, and the value of never giving up.
D’Adamo: Within your family, who have been the most influential people?
Foreman: I was named after my father Jon, and my grandfather, Joseph, and ironically they have both been the two to teach me the most about life. My dad was always my coach throughout T-Ball and Incrediball and even Minors Little League. My grandfather has been my biggest and proudest supporter through all of my ups and downs in life. The two of them have given me the gift of belief in the lesson that nothing is over in life until you say so, and to never stop striving to make yourself better, and to get what you want. The only thing standing between you and your dreams is the BS you keep telling yourself about why you can’t have it. I am so proud of them as they are of me.
D’Adamo: Name a historical figure, dead or alive, in or out of sports you would most like to meet.
Foreman: I would love to meet JFK or Abraham Lincoln - the only two real Presidents we have had in this country who actually tried to shake things up and change the status quo in action, not just political promises. I bet they would have some crazy stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment