My love for soccer started when I was 3 years old. My father started me into it and he played his whole life all the way through high school and is even still playing to today. For as long as I can remember I was always the smallest player on the team. I never had the best skill. I never scored any goals. But | always had fun playing with friends. My father coached me for every team i was on until I played with a different coach, and that changed my whole life and the way I played.
With my dad coaching me and me always being the smallest on the team, I didn’t get much better because my dad was always really nice to me and I always played the same position. He didn’t push me to become better the way I wished he did. When I started playing with more of my friends on the other team, I played positions | have never played before. I didn’t like it at first because I always stayed in the same position and never played anywhere else, but after a couple weeks it started to get really fun.
With playing on this new team and playing with different players I learned that I was good at other positions and I didn’t always have to play the same position. My coach always pushed us to become better than we already were. One of his main goals for us was to improve our skill to make the high school soccer team. When joined his team he was coaching a recreational team, and always wanted us to become better to make a higher team like Select or Premier. That is why I decided to join. He always found ways to our practices fun. Every year he would have candy hanging and in the corners of the goal.
Whichever thing we hit when we shot the ball is what we got to keep. So I practiced and practiced weeks before leven knew we would do that, just to get better to get some candy. Joining that team was one of the best decisions for my soccer career. The next year my coach and my father coached a Select team. That team that we made was not good at all, but the memories that were made were unforgettable. During the season we did not win one of our games. The best game we had was we tied 0-0 and we got lucky. The next year we ended up bringing together one of the most successful teams I have played on.
We had so many talented players, and I was nowhere near close to how good they were. I was probably one of the worst players on the team. My father once told me a story. In his Junior year he made the varsity team. He was the only Junior on the team, and the rest were seniors. All of the seniors were way better than his but the coach brought him on the team because he saw potential in him. By the end of the year he improved so much, he was just as good as the seniors. I thought about this while playing on this team. Instead of thinking myself as the worst player on the team, I thought of myself as the best ones to improve.
By the end of that yearl improved significantly in my defensive and offensive skill. The next year was my freshman year and I was going to tryout for the JV team. I thought to myself that I didn’t think that I could make it because I heard that Camas Soccer team was very hard to make it into, but I was going to try my hardest. Tryouts were in the morning before school and it was freezing. Walking out onto the field as seeing all of the best Varsity players warming up was just great so see. I was wishing that one day I could be as good as them. I did not do very good. I was cut the first morning.
I was hoping to make it farther than | did but there was way more competition than I expected. So I tried even harder to make it the next year. The next year. became much better, I tried really hard to stand out to the coaches. I should have been cut that morning but the coaches wanted to see more of me. So the next afternoon I showed up and didn’t know what to expect. I just heard a few things from my friends. I knew for a fact that I was better than some of the freshman this year. I successfully made it past the first day without being cut. The next day I showed up and we did some 1 on 1 things and I wasn’t great at that.
At the end of tryouts that day the coaches pulled me aside along with a few other people. They told me that my skill wasn’t there. I wasn’t good enough to make it on the team. After that I realized something I am still going to be playing on another team, The Screaming Eagles. This team was made of some guys from my high school. Most of them have not played for at least of 5 years. Then I thought to myself I will still have fun on this team. After that season on the fun team I was glad I didn’t make the high school team because it isn’t about how good the team is that you play on it’s how much fun and the memories you make while playing.
