Sports Extra: DeLovell Earls

DeLovell Earls is a renaissance man. He is an inventor, and an entrepreneur.

He's a basketball coach at the Colorado Springs School.

He played basketball and graduated from Air Force, and he is an author. 

He has written a book titled, "What if". 

It's a book about not limiting yourself.

DeLovell has always been creative. When he was in elementary school, his fifth grade science teacher banned "What if" questions.

"I thought that was ludicrous, and (it was) something I held on to," DeLovell says. 

He held on to it until he was a cadet playing basketball at the Air Force Academy. 

"Coming from a school in high school where  I was heavy into art and sports, going into the rigor of the academy and the military,  I had an English teacher that  finally just let us be and said, 'Hey, write me a poem', DeLovell says. "Like, I don't care what it's about. I don't care the structure of it.  And  for once there I felt like I could be myself."

"I wrote the first version of "What If?" back in  2010. So when I wrote the first version, I was about 19 years old.

With some encouragement from a good friend. His poem  turned into a book.

Inventing new things takes some time,  

"I shared it with one of my best friends and he said,  You have to make this a children's book. Just in my professional life  in coaching, I ran into a lot of people that said they weren't creative. And I truly believe everyone has  an innate creativity  and I wanted to  help kids recognize that and help people hold on to that. Everything around us was made by somebody.  Why not you?"

When he was growing up, he felt there were those who felt  he was supposed to play sports. 

"I grew up on the south side of Colorado Springs, DeLovell says.  "Through conversations there, you know, teachers like  my fifth grade teacher, that bandwidth questions,  it kind of put me in a space where I felt like I had to be good at sports. Like that was my only way out.  And  it's it's ludicrous. And I think that  everybody is  has something. And yes, there might be sports, but  everyone's capable of  building something and creating something. And  that shouldn't be someone's only outlet."

An outlet for creativity that he believes  everyone has inside of them.

"As we  progress in life,  we get more limited in our creativity a lot of times. Or if it's a little bit out of fear, it's a little bit out of other people telling us what we're  supposed to be doing. "

You DeLovell's buy his book here.