Personal Narrative: How Soccer Changed My Life

Finding your group of people can be such a peaceful relief. I believe in friends turning into family. Soccer has brought so many things into my life that I would have never been exposed to elsewhere, but the most significant thing the sport has gifted me with is lifelong friendships. Even though the girls I played with were 1 year older than I was, they still accepted me. The girls I met when I was 7 years old, basically watched me grow up and have been there for me since. I realized that those girls were like family in a memorable game back in 2012. I played at least one hundred games with that group of girls, celebrated many goals with them, and shared thousands of laughter’s with them. On a warm Sunday evening, my team lined up to face

I looked over to my right and I saw a smile on my coaches face that I had never seen before, probably because half the time he was yelling at us, “hustle, hustle, run!” but I knew he was proud of us, I could tell by that smile. To my left was one of the greatest teammates I had the privilege to play with. She had her arm around me saying “wow Messi isn’t this great or what”; I went by Messi because of how talented I was in their eyes and my obsession with the professional soccer player Messi, and have carried the name ever since. As I looked around the huddle I started feeling more and more at home, I knew I could be myself around these girls which felt good because I felt like I couldn’t be myself elsewhere. We then grabbed the water cooler and poured it down our coach’s back, it was ice cold water so he didn’t really like that. The coaches handed out our first place medals along with presenting the first place trophy to the team. I wore that medal around my neck for the next week, I loved it. We were all stinky and sweaty but that didn’t matter to any of us, we had just won our first championship as a team, as a family. I took lots of pride in have taken part of that huddle that day, there was no greater feeling. Everyone linked by the arms was just the symbol of unity amongst people with distinctive backgrounds but with one objective. We became family because we put the team before anything else, and selfishness became extinct from that moment forward. The smiles on my teammates and coaches faces meant true happiness even through adversity. This could take anyone a long