My Experience With A Soccer Ball Has Been Best Friends For Years

Ever since I could remember, soccer had been in my life. If there was a soccer team that needed a coach, my father was always the first to volunteer. There were almost too many strenuous weekends spent hours away from home for soccer tournaments to count. My entire family, consisting of my parents, my siblings, my dog, and myself, packed in a mini-van heading to a city that I had never heard of for soccer games. But when I entered high school, all that would soon go away. I kept playing the same sport that I always had, although now I had to wake up at five in the morning for six hours of high school soccer practice in the smoldering summer heat in order to make the high school team. High School sports were more competitive than anything I had done before. I put in as much effort as I could to make the Varsity High School team, staying out past dinner to practice even longer. I was utterly divulged in soccer and trying to be the best I could be. Soon, I would regret placing a game over spending time with my family.

As a young girl, I was introduced to soccer by my father. I think I was about eight at the time when I first played on a recreational team, and I remember that I had always wanted to play goalkeeper. In soccer, the goalkeeper is the last defensive player, but is also the first offensive player once the play turns. The idea of playing such an important position thrilled me, and it didn’t hurt that the goalkeeper gets the opportunity to use their hands as well as punt the ball across the field. From the age of nine until the age of eleven, I played competitive and recreational soccer as a goalkeeper, and stopped in the sixth grade. I picked the sport back up as a freshman in high school, after my younger sister had urged me to join the school

Lush, green grass began to massage my bare feet. Sunshine beamed off the clean, white goal posts. With my cleats in my hands, ball in my bag, and my freshly washed shirt, only one thing came to mind: soccer. The sport I love and have devoted the past three years was evolving. Many of my friends were shifting from recreational to club soccer. After three years of recreational soccer, I decided to take my game to the next level and tryout for club soccer. Eager to showcase my skills, I stood on the field bearing confidence. Before tryouts began, my thoughts solely consisted of playing club soccer with my friends. I thought little about tryout preparation, because I didn’t know what to expect. No one gave me information about how to perform well

At the age of ten I was the most energetic, go-lucky, confident girl. I excelled at my beloved sport, soccer. I had been playing since I was just a mere five years old, far longer than the other girls. Playing so long had helped me be at a higher level of skill than most of the other players on my team.

Everyone has that certain thing that makes them who they are. That certain thing for me is soccer. It’s my hobby, my biggest interest, and my passion. Soccer isn’t just a sport for me, it’s my life. It has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I have played the intriguing game of soccer since I was four years old, and I have loved it ever since.

Getting cut from the soccer team was a wakeup call that taught me a hard lesson: Talent alone won’t guarantee success. The coaches didn’t pick me not because I failed to show my skill but because of my nonchalant attitude at tryouts. Instead of holding their critique personally, I took their comments as motivation to change my attitude. From that experience on, I learned that attitude play an important role in success.

I been playing soccer since I was five years old and I never been in a fight while playing or seeing one. That changed when I moved to Fargo. I was born in Kenya and raised there. My family and I moved to the United State in 2008. We lived in Memphis, TN for a couple of months and we moved to Portland, Maine. I have passionate for the sport of soccer. I play other sports such as basketball and football, but I enjoy playing soccer the most. I played soccer my four years of High School and it was great even though my team didn’t win state championship for the four years that I played, but we were once close and we let it slip out. High school soccer give me different perspective of the game that I didn’t know. I remember when I was young all we did was run around and kick the ball, mostly try to score a goal before the opponent. That is not how football is played generally, it’s a teamwork game, without knowing your position and where u good at then there is no chemistry between you and your teammates. My freshman year I was told to forget what I know and learn new system. It took me two years to learn the system after I learned the game I started with playing with the varsity team which is more complicated because it’s the hardest level in high school. After high I went on to college and i tried to play college soccer but I couldn’t because of my school and work schedule. After finishing my first semester of college my family and I decided to move to Fargo, ND.

Starting from 8th grade, I played on the school team, and at the midpoint of the season, I realized that I had to practice my hardest because we were going to have a tournament. I started to ask the coach to teach me different style of plays. He taught me so many things when I stayed after practice. I still remember, two or three of my teammates would stay with me at the end of practice and work as much as I did. After working hard in practice, I used the skills I learned and won the entire tournament.

The next big milestone in soccer for me was when I was a freshman in high school. I went to Troy High and didn 't think I was good enough to play high school soccer. If it wasn’t for my best friend’s dad, I really wouldn 't have played. He told me that I would regret not playing and that I had a lot of potential. I decided to try out with my three best friends and we all ran and did exhausting fitness exercises for weeks during tryouts. First, we’d have to do five laps around the track. In the beginning of the season, those five laps are a killer. By the end of the second one, I am usually out of breath. After that, we’d get into groups and do stations, like jumping over bars or doing sit-ups and push-ups, basically anything to get us into shape. The third part of practice was sprinting. I like sprints because I am way better at running faster for one-hundred yards, than doing a long distance run. The next part of tryouts were the best, all the girls would get put into two teams and we’d just scrimmage so he could see our real soccer skills. Coach Haviland, who was the varsity coach, decided teams after the tough two weeks. He said I had a little maturing to do on the field and that I will be on varsity in no time. I was shocked! I didn 't even think he was considering me. I had a lot of fun with the Junior Varsity team and made lots of friends. By

Nearly every time I had a tournament, I frantically checked the draws, praying for an easy win. Every time there was a player better than me, I gave up and just left it all to fate. As expected, I would lose easily. My losses took a huge toll on me. I began to lose matches against players who were supposedly “easy” to beat. Rather than blaming it on my weak mind, I would blame my skills, or even something irrelevant, like the noise level. I would then practice for hours trying to improve my groundstrokes. While my game improved, my mindset never changed, leading me to continue on a losing streak. Changing this mindset and overcoming this challenge took a while. I forced myself to not look at draws before a tournament and play the best I can. By doing this, I did not let my mind and my self-confidence become a hindrance to my game. In a couple of months, I got so used to playing without fear of the person on the other side of the net that I was unfazed, even after returning to looking at the draws before a tournament. As a result, I learned to relax more and focus on playing, rather than focusing on my

The game was about to start, walking onto the court, warming up and getting ready for tip-off, I had a huge amount of confidence before hand. The game had begun, although, as the game went on, I wasn’t doing as well as I would have liked. It seemed like I couldn’t hit a shot, neither could the entire team.Throughout the game, we were always down, we never lead at any

Soccer is my favorite sport, no I don’t watch it on tv, nor do I have a favorite soccer team. So, it all started when I was eight years old I believe I told my mom that I didn’t want to do a certain thing anymore and that I wanted to play a sport a.k.a soccer. She of course told me sure. So she signed me up for soccer a couple of days later. I was so happy I was jumping up and down with excitement. Little did I know that I would love the sport. So, the day of the first soccer practice I was nervous I never done anything with the team and I had these questions running in my head like what if no one likes you here? Or what if you like the sport? Or what if you aren’t even good enough ? but I let these questions slide and I had learned how to play the sport. In that amount of time I thought no more like Challenged myself and said “ Cassie you can do this you are going to be apart of this team and you are going to be the best.” From then on I challenged myself, I practiced almost all the

Basketball has always been an easy sport for me. I was the team captain and one of the carriers of the team. I was quite confident in myself and knew the consequences of not playing. But when I became a freshman in high school and could not play on the middle school team I had one option, to play on the varsity team. I was nervous because I had made friends on the middle school team but did not know the dynamic of the varsity team. When the first practice rolled around I was anxious.

Yet my apprehension prevailed as I continued to fear getting put in the game in case another player was injured. I was still afraid of making mistakes and getting blamed by screaming coaches and angry teammates. Sometimes these fears came true. During my sophomore season, my position led me to play in the varsity games on many occasions. On such occasions, I often made mistakes. Most of the time the mistakes were not significant; they rarely changed the outcome of a play. Yet I received a thorough verbal lashing at practice for the mistakes I had made. These occurrences only compounded my fears of playing. However, I did not always make mistakes. Sometimes I made great plays, for which I was congratulated. Now, as I dawn on my senior year of soccer, I feel like a changed person.

Most people only see me an average kid, playing a game on a field, with a soccer ball. Nothing more, nothing less. I think about times when I played well, when I played poorly, when not everything has gone my way. I have had coaches tell me I'm one of the best on the team and I have had the director of coaches for my club tell me that I lack the skill needed to play for the A team.