Column by Carly Grenfell

I’d say a significant amount has changed since I last wrote — the biggest of all being the NCAA summer regulation changes.

In the past, we have never been allowed to be with coaches in June and July.

Every workout, other than weight lifting, was strictly on our own.

This year was the first time we were able to have team practices.

I will admit I was a little skeptical at first, but it didn’t take me long to realize that having the extra guidance in a relatively new system was a great weapon to utilize.

We were able to pick up right where we left off and build on where we are headed this season. Which, I might add, is a destination we can’t help but get excited about.

Last year wasn’t the season anyone had in mind, but the beauty of that is knowing what we can get better at and using our summer practices to do so.

I saw a quote that has grown into one of my favorites: “Beaten but never broken.”

We can all fail. We can all lose. We can all experience defeat.

Those things are inevitable, but what we can’t do is let those moments, which can be completely overbearing at times, fall into the traps of self-pity.

I’ve learned over the past three years that sometimes things just don’t go your way.

Often, we create a perfect fantasy world in our minds of how we think life should be and even more often than that, it doesn’t happen.

It’s those who don’t back down to failure that experience success.

It is crazy to think that success wouldn’t even exist if failure never happened in our day-to-day lives.

Some may say that we should embrace failure.

But to me, “embracing” has a slight undertone of contentment.

If everyone responded to failure with the mindset, “Everyone fails, it’s ok,” we begin to settle for mediocrity.

I’m not saying that it’s not ok to fail.

I’m saying that failure should give us all that extra chip on our shoulder.

It should drive us to bounce back, but even stronger.

And the Bulldogs are going to do exactly that. Beaten, but never broken. Stay tuned.