Small Town Restaurants

When you live in a city like Topeka, you have an unbelievable amount of options to eat at. You can just drive down Wannamaker and find pretty much any chain restaurant you want to eat at. If you keep navigating throughout Topeka, you can find so many local restaurants to choose from as well. In a small town, it is not like that at all. The town I'm from didn't even have a restaurant. We had a gas station and a historic sandwich shop (Which I must say makes the best sandwiches ever!).  If we wanted food, we had to drive a town over. Even then our options were very slim. The only food places in all of the surrounding towns are Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Sonic and Subway. If you want anything else you have to drive to a city. (Which is a good 20-25 minute drive). If you wanted to get groceries at Walmart, or go shopping at a mall, you had to make a day of it. Luckily where I am from, Joplin isn't that far away, but for other towns sometimes it can be up to a 45 minute drive. Trying to put that into perspective can be hard for people from big cities. Just imagine every time you wanted to go out to eat or go shopping, you have to drive to Lawrence or Manhattan. When that's all you know it's not as big of a deal. I mean yeah, it's kind of inconvenient but not that bad. Because of the lack of restaurants, none of our surrounding schools allowed high school students to leave school for lunch. We could order from Pizza Hut and have them deliver, but that's about it. Moving to a city really showed me the luxury of having so many restaurant options so close to where I live. That is definitely something I like better about city life than living in a small town.

Small Town Athletics

Being from a small town, youth athletics are a huge deal. Parent's start signing their kids up for flag football and T-ball at age 4 and more times than not those kids play all the way through at least middle school. The entire town fills the stands to watch Friday night football as if it was a sacred tradition. If a sporting event is away, the folks that can't attend are more than likely listening or watching the game live from their radios or computers at home. Friendships and chemistry are made  for many athletes, and even the fans, throughout this 12-14 year span. It is truly heart breaking for the entire community when an athlete has play their last game as seniors in high school. 

I've been a multi-sport athlete for as a long as I can remember. It was like I was born with a ball in my hand. I spent 90% of my childhood at some sort of practice or game, whether it was mine or my siblings. Sports camps consumed my summer breaks and weekends to the point I felt burnt out and wanted to quit everything by my Junior year of high school. It was so easy for the coaches to pack each of their sport with as many training camps as possible, but they never stopped to think about the multi-sport athletes that would spend 9-10 hours a day going back and forth between camps and practices. Coaches at a small town are typically also faculty members at that high school. Whether they are the PE coach, or the history teacher, they usually have a job at the school. One of the major downfalls to small town athletics is the unbelievable amount of favoritism. More times than not their is always a few students who have the "last name" that gets them their spot. Whether that "last name" indicating that they are the coaches kid or the principal's kid, or even just a popular family in the town, they still usually get special treatment and playing time that is definitely not earned. Don't get me wrong, not every coach is like that, but the ones that are really take away from the overall chemistry that has been building with that group of young athletes for years. When it comes the fans, there are so many homegrown people who have followed a local school's athletic department for years on end. They proudly wear our school colors in public, and contribute to every single fundraiser they know about. Without them, small town programs would be hurting. I will say, the thing that really separates city sports from small town sports is the amount of change. In a small town, you grow up playing whatever sport you do with the same small group of people. So by the time you're a senior, you have an unbelievable amount of chemistry. With city schools having so many different kids not joining together until high school, it makes it a little harder to find that chemistry, but at the same time there are a lot more options to choose from.