I didn’t set out to write Changing Cadence: Friendship, Football, and the Art of Transition. It came out of a restlessness I couldn’t quite name.
Football had always been the one place where I didn’t second-guess myself. On the field, everything was immediate. Instinct took over. There was no time to wonder if I belonged — I just did.
Off the field … different story.
There were expectations — clear ones — about who I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to behave. Football didn’t exactly make that list. So I got good at living in two spaces: one where I was fully myself, and one where I adjusted just enough to make everyone comfortable. Not a dramatic adjustment. Just a slight editing of the truth.
But eventually, the game changes — or ends — and you’re left without the one place that made everything make sense. No huddle, no play clock, no team. Just you, standing there, wondering what exactly carries over and what doesn’t.
At the same time I was navigating my own transitions, my mother moved into an assisted living community in our small hometown in Florida. She and her lifelong friends — sharp, funny, completely unfiltered — became an unexpected part of my world in a way I never could have predicted.
And oddly enough, through life’s magic, those two groups found each other. My football team. My mother and her friends. Different generations, different lives, different everything. And yet, they connected. Conversations that started as small moments turned into real relationships. There was humor, honesty, and a kind of mutual recognition that didn’t need explanation.
My novel is based on real experiences. The relationships between my mother’s circle and the team grew out of something true — and then were allowed to stretch, just enough, to better capture what they meant.
What struck me was how little separated them in the ways that mattered. The same need to be seen. The same desire to belong. The same instinct to show up for each other.
Different stages of life. Same questions underneath.
That’s where this book really started.
I wanted to write about transition — not as a single moment, but as something that follows us throughout our lives. I wanted to write about friendship, not just among peers, but across generations. And about the unexpected ways people find each other, even when the connection shouldn’t logically exist.
The title, Changing Cadence, comes from football, but it’s really about life. A shift in rhythm. A disruption. A moment where you have to adjust on the fly and hope it works out — preferably without jumping offsides.
In the end, this book isn’t just about football. It’s about the threads that connect us — across time, across experience, across generations — and the realization that no matter where you are in life, you’re still reaching for the same things.
Connection. Meaning. Each other.
Which sounds simple.
It isn’t.
But when it happens — even unexpectedly — it’s everything.
