European Touchdown: American football player prefers to live the life of a European

Raised in Fountain Valley, California, Christopher Debowski, a quarterback,
has used American football as his escape to travel.

“Football is my gateway to do the things I want to do,” he said. “To travel, to experience the things I want to experience and to meet the people that I’ve met.”

Debowski has left his California life to embrace the European culture. In the past four years he was living in Germany and Spain.

Even though this life is very exciting, he admits that he wasn’t ready to leave the life the United States provides.

He wanted to travel and get away from the customs of the States, of starting adulthood at a young age and having a career straight out of college even as a marketing major.

“I just wasn’t ready to get a real job,” Debowski said. “I had the opportunity to play football and I knew that if I didn’t take this opportunity now, then later in life I wouldn’t have it.”

Living away from home wasn’t always this glamorous for Debowski. While studying in New York he experienced a tough time fitting in with his east coast teammates.

He took a deep breath and explained, “I was having a hard time adapting with the people and I was really homesick at first.”

Though he didn’t give into his homesickness, his mother helped him cope with it, by giving him the best advice.

‘“If you’re going to be somewhere” she told him. “Be there and not anywhere else.”

It wasn’t long until he implemented this advice to every location he went, including his next destination in Europe.

His smile explained why he felt at home in Spain:

“Here I get a very strong sense of family, the families here are much close than those of the U.S,” he began. “And that also translates into the friendships.”

The friends that Debowski has in Spain are his own European family.

He said in complete admiration, “Man they treat you like family, if you don’t have anywhere to go, they’ll bring you. They’ll do anything for you.”

Having the Spanish family culture wasn’t the only reason he had an easy time adapting. It was the Spanish culture being implemented into a football team.

“I had an instant group of forty to fifty friends,” he explained.

Leaving home isn’t easy for anyone but Christopher Debowski is an excellent example of a great life that can happen if you choose to try something new.

A piece of advice from Christopher Debowski:

For anyone who is second guessing themselves about leaving home or has any doubts about having this option of staying home or leaving, for me my advice is to go. Always get out of your comfort zone. That’s when you really grow as a person. You start to know what you really like about yourself and if you stay at home for the most part you’ll know what’s going to happen, but if you leave, you don’t know.

The original article appeared in Valeria’s blog, IValiant.