Growing up my dad was a basketball coach and my mom was recognized as a four year varsity athlete for basketball in one of the top high schools in Michigan. So playing basketball had seemed to be inevitable for me, and while I was technically good at the sport and could compete with almost anyone my age, I never really established a love for the game. So on my tenth birthday at Dave & Busters I wandered over to this fairly large machine in the back corner of the arcade. When I pulled open the curtain it was just open space and you had to go to the front of the machine and select a sport. Since so many of my friends played soccer I selected that and for the game the only objective was to kick a virtual ball past the digital goalkeeper. While
…show more content…
I remember going to Sports Authority with my mother and buying the absolute cheapest soccer apparel in the world. After picking every item up and proceeding to checkout my mom uttered, “This better be the sport for you because I’m not buying anything else for any other sport.”. Those words at first made me a little nervous. But, when I got to the field and inhaled the sweet fresh air and the pleasant smell of fresh cut grass I knew I had found a new home. Also, in that practice the head coach, Coach Brian had us try out for positions since almost the entire team wanted to play forward to score goals. At the end of that practice he had gave us our new positions and we got to choose our jersey numbers. He told me that I would play center-mid because I was good at passing and at being the facilitator on the field. I then chose the number 7 because it was my favorite players’- Franck Ribery’s- number. The following year I left that team and took my position and number to the number 3 team in the state AFC Lightning. My new teammates were amazing and I did not know how I made the team and even started but I wasn’t exactly going to oppose either. I started to become more and more exposed to really good players while playing for this team and I loved it. And as I turned 15 I had made ODP (Olympic Development Program), became the captain of my club team, and started varsity as a …show more content…
We then took a shuttle bus to our hotel in Madrid and went to sleep as soon as we got in our separate rooms since we had a game the next morning. Our coach came by our rooms at 7 A.M the following morning and woke all of us up for a pre-game training session on the beach. The session wasn’t anything but passing and jogging on the beach. Later that day at 11 A.M our game was about to start in the Costa Blanca Cup against a team called Santos from Brazil. In the first five minutes me and the kid from the opposing team jumped up for the header but since he was running onto the ball and I had jumped vertically when we collided his force knocked me into the goal post and all I could hear was a pop in my lower back. I had to immediately come out of the game and I was taken to one of the local hospitals. I had never been in a hospital before so I was a little nervous seeing all these sick people kind of freaked me out and the people that just laid in the hospital beds motionless made me a little startled. And after an X-Ray and MRI the doctor concluded that my lower back was fractured and I had a pinched nerve so it looked like I could never play soccer again. At first this killed me but when I really thought about it, if I didn’t listen to my parents and value education this back injury could’ve set me back further than just soccer.
While it is sad I can no longer play soccer, since then I have achieved
I remember going to Sports Authority with my mother and buying the absolute cheapest soccer apparel in the world. After picking every item up and proceeding to checkout my mom uttered, “This better be the sport for you because I’m not buying anything else for any other sport.”. Those words at first made me a little nervous. But, when I got to the field and inhaled the sweet fresh air and the pleasant smell of fresh cut grass I knew I had found a new home. Also, in that practice the head coach, Coach Brian had us try out for positions since almost the entire team wanted to play forward to score goals. At the end of that practice he had gave us our new positions and we got to choose our jersey numbers. He told me that I would play center-mid because I was good at passing and at being the facilitator on the field. I then chose the number 7 because it was my favorite players’- Franck Ribery’s- number. The following year I left that team and took my position and number to the number 3 team in the state AFC Lightning. My new teammates were amazing and I did not know how I made the team and even started but I wasn’t exactly going to oppose either. I started to become more and more exposed to really good players while playing for this team and I loved it. And as I turned 15 I had made ODP (Olympic Development Program), became the captain of my club team, and started varsity as a …show more content…
We then took a shuttle bus to our hotel in Madrid and went to sleep as soon as we got in our separate rooms since we had a game the next morning. Our coach came by our rooms at 7 A.M the following morning and woke all of us up for a pre-game training session on the beach. The session wasn’t anything but passing and jogging on the beach. Later that day at 11 A.M our game was about to start in the Costa Blanca Cup against a team called Santos from Brazil. In the first five minutes me and the kid from the opposing team jumped up for the header but since he was running onto the ball and I had jumped vertically when we collided his force knocked me into the goal post and all I could hear was a pop in my lower back. I had to immediately come out of the game and I was taken to one of the local hospitals. I had never been in a hospital before so I was a little nervous seeing all these sick people kind of freaked me out and the people that just laid in the hospital beds motionless made me a little startled. And after an X-Ray and MRI the doctor concluded that my lower back was fractured and I had a pinched nerve so it looked like I could never play soccer again. At first this killed me but when I really thought about it, if I didn’t listen to my parents and value education this back injury could’ve set me back further than just soccer.
While it is sad I can no longer play soccer, since then I have achieved