By popular request, I have been asked to blog about my recent adventures with the intramural soccer championships. I was planning on doing this anyway, but my parents suggested something more. In my dad's words, "the culmination of years of a colorful soccer success story." I realized that there really is quite a journey involved in my soccer career, with high points and low points and stories and lessons scattered along the way. So I decided to think back through all the memories, excitements, pain, changes, friendships, insecurities, confidence building, and growth that has come from the great sport of soccer and my long journey with it.
I started playing soccer when I was eight, the first age that you could. Other sports came and went through elementary and middle school, but soccer was always my favorite and I played it every fall and spring. Very early on my favorite position to play was forward. The feeling of dribbling down the field, shooting on goal, and seeing the ball hit the back of the net is priceless. I played that position as much as I could. They introduced the position of goalie and rotated everyone through playing it and I liked that too, but forward was still my favorite. I played soccer all through elementary school and saw all the good players start going towards the competitive teams. None of my brothers had done competitive sports because it was a big time commitment with all the long drives for Saturday games and not very convenient for our busy family. But through several convincing factors and the help of my brother Greg, my parents let me try out for the competitive team at the end of my 6th grade year.
I made the competitive team and played with them for two seasons during my 7th grade. It was a great experience for me and I learned so much more about soccer, improved my skills, played with people who were better than me so I was really challenging myself, and just stretched and grew in so many ways. I played a couple different positions on the field until one game when our goalie got hurt and the team needed someone to take her spot. I was feeling a little sick and didn't want to run around a lot, and I had enjoyed goalie in the past, so I volunteered. It was a pretty close and intense game, but I managed to hold my own. After that game my coach and team decided that I would be playing goalie for the rest of the year. My dad told me afterward that he had been praying on the sidelines that I would be able to stop the goals so that I would have confidence as goalie and keep at it. He got his wish because I went on to play goalie for several years.
The next year I tried out to play on the same competitive team again. To my complete surprise and heartbreak, I did not make the team. It was really unexpected, because once someone makes that team, they usually stay on it. I clearly remember the next day at school when all my teammates were consoling me and expressing their confusion and shock at me being cut. My coach gave me some reason like there wouldn't be enough playing time for the rest of the players if so many people were on the team, but from what I heard through the season, due to injuries and other reasons they sometimes were short players. When this happened I was completely crushed because I thought that my soccer career was over. My visions of playing high school soccer faded away. There was not really another team that I could play on, and our high school soccer program was intense enough that missing one year would make a significant difference. I began to think of my other options (my mom kept hinting at cross country, sorry Mom...) and finally the idea was reached that I could tryout for the high school team as an eighth grader. It was recommended that eighth graders try out in order to gain experience and know what was coming, but they didn't usually get put on the team. So I tried out along with most of my old teammates.
They needed a goalie on the C-team so I tried out primarily as a goalie, and I made it! The season that followed was full of more learning, stretching, and growing as I expanded my skills and gained more experience. My abilities were really challenged as I was the only eighth grader on the team and was playing with people older and more experienced than me. But I learned a lot and at the end of the season I was voted the Most Improved Player by my teammates. Through the season I became more confident in my goalie abilities, but I still longed to play on the field as a forward as well. At the beginning of the season, there were two goalies and we would each play one half in goal and one half on the field. That was the ideal situation for me, but I began to doubt my abilities as a field player through derogatory comments and feelings from my coach. Despite assurances from my teammates and assistant coach, I lost confidence in my field playing and focused instead on goalie. My coach began playing me as goalie for the entire game, because he said I was more reliable. There was at least something that I could have confidence in, and as I helped lead my team to a victory in the end of the season tournament, I was sure that goalie would be the position that I stayed with for the rest of the season.
The next spring I played on a competitive team since the school team plays only in the fall. I was the only goalie and only eighth grader on a team that was a mix of freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. We had to play in the league that the oldest people on our team would be in, so as a scrawny, short little eighth grader (no exaggeration, I was a scrawny little stick back then) I was playing in a league of people several years older than me. I was definitely not your stereotypical goalie, and I am sure I looked very out of place. I was sick with nervousness before several of the games, but I pushed through the season and continued to learn more, and was then voted the Most Improved Player once again.
The next fall was my freshman year and I tried out for the high school team again. This time all of my old teammates were trying out with me again, but now they were trying out much more seriously because if they didn't make this team there was no other soccer option. Let me remind you that my school's soccer program is very intense. Many a girl has moved in to the town and decided that they want to try soccer, but then show up to tryouts and realize it is no joke. It is never a given that as you get older, you move up to the next level team. The varsity team truly is elite, and even people who have played on the high school team the first three years of high school are not guaranteed a spot on the varsity team. I have seen many of them turned away. I was nervous to see what would happen now that all my old teammates were trying out for the same positions as me. I ended up making the JV team with only two other freshmen. The rest of my old teammates were on the C-team. That season was probably my favorite soccer season that I have had. I loved my team, my coach, and just the whole general situation. My coach really stretched me and helped me to grow and learn. He also started getting ideas that I would be a good forward, and throughout the season he gave me little opportunities to try it out. Games in which we were winning significantly, he would put someone else in as goalie and let me play forward. Memories of how much I loved forward came back to me, and he kept encouraging me and telling me that I should try it out. I wanted to, but I still had all my insecurities developed from my old coach that were always bearing down on me. I played goalie with an older team again the next spring, but my coach worked with me during the summer and then sophomore year I tried out as a forward. I made JV again which was what I expected, because I had to make up for all the lost time and develop my skills. It was another year of stretching and challenging myself as I tried to push and improve myself. I had the same coach and he kept encouraging and helping me. The next spring I played with a lot of the same people and continued to play forward.
My junior year was a tough year, and I did not make varsity. I was not expecting to, because I still felt like I had so much to improve and learn. I would have been fine with it, except that I had a different coach and he made it a very difficult season. I know that you cannot blame everything on a coach, but it does make a big difference. He just seemed to have it out for me from the very beginning and didn't seem to like me at all. He didn't give me a lot of playing time and just had a lot of negative vibes and actions toward me. Soccer was supposed to fun, that's why I started it in the first place, but the fun seemed to have been lost amidst all the politics, competition, and biases that had developed. I decided not to try out for the varsity team the next year, because there were too many things going against it. I needed to work and save money for college and I was not willing to put in all the time and stress that would be required in order to play on the varsity team and the coach that went with it. I never regretted my decision and I think it was the best thing for me to do, but there were many of those moments when I really missed soccer.
Enter intramural soccer! This fall I got to play on a girls intramural soccer team and it was such a great experience. I did not really know anyone on my team, they were all people who had lived in my ward before I moved in, or friends of the people on the team and they were all at least a couple years older than me. But I got to know them all and they were such nice, fun, friendly people and I had a great time playing on the team with them. It was so good to be able to go back to soccer in a comfortable, low-key setting. I played forward for the first few games, and let other people borrow my goalie gloves to play goalie. Neither of the girls had really played goalie much, and one game we were losing pretty bad, and I felt like I should try to do my part. I volunteered to play goalie for the second half, and everything came rushing back. The first time that the ball came to me and I had to dive for it, I remembered why I had played and loved goalie so much. My teammates all decided that I should play goalie for the rest of the season. There has been this everlasting rotation between goalie and forward, and I am sure that it will continue. As corny as it may sound, there are times when I am meant to play forward and there are times when I am meant to play goalie. This was a time that I was definitely meant to be goalie, and I felt like I would have been abandoning my abilities if I hadn't stepped up and volunteered.
Our team ended up winning all the games in our tournament and then made it to the final four. I never thought we would have made it that far, but we actually ended up winning the whole thing! Last week we played in the finals and through a huge and dramatic comeback, we won the tournament! We became intramural champs, and won the shirts that are known as the most coveted t-shirt on campus. It was such an exciting day for me, and not just for the tournament victory (which was very exciting on its own!). There were so many other victories won that day as well. I was able to go back to soccer, conquer all my fears, and bring back that positive association that I have always had it, but seemed to be missing. I was also able to become part of a team again, and a team that I felt like I was a significant part of. I felt needed and important, which are feelings I had been lacking, and I knew that people truly would notice if I was not at a game. One of my teammates went as far as to say that our team would not have won without me. While I don't think that's true, it is still such an amazing feeling to have someone think that. There is nothing in the world like feeling needed, noticed, and appreciated.
Sorry that this got so long, I am sure the people who asked me to write it did not mean for it to be so long, but I realized that there really are so many stories and lessons from soccer. And there are so many others that I didn't include. But one thing is for sure, my life would not have been the same without soccer...
