Being back home in Miami is where I feel most heard. I recently moved up here to Tallahassee to pursue my college career and try my best to succeed. But in doing so, I left behind many things that were important to me and things that made me who I am today. My mom has always been a big inspiration to me, she amazes me with all she can do, being one of the most intelligent woman I’ve met especially being a single mother to my sister and me. She made me into the young woman I am today, she taught me to follow my dreams and never stop trying. She always wanted the best for me, she loved having me involved in many activities as a kid and luckily I was an active kid that loved to run around. Starting at the age of four, she got me involved in playing soccer and from there my love for the sport grew larger and larger. Soccer has been part of my life ever since. I have played every year since the start, from playing club soccer as well as playing for my middle school and high school all four years on the varsity team. Throughout my many years of playing, I moved from team to team which means that I was constantly meeting new people. Sooner or later those people became my family whether I liked it or not. They were my teammates and I had to work with them. As many have said before, “team work makes the dream work” and I can say this is absolutely true. Being part of a team has taught me so much in life, it helped me grow as a person and taught me many lessons in life. You can’t always do everything in life by yourself, there will constantly be people there ready to help you. And I knew that my girls were always there for me, on and off the field. One of the most important thing that I had learned was communication. Communication was key when it came to playing a soccer game. Without it we were lost on the field, not knowing what we were doing and what we should have been doing. There have been multiple instances during a game where my team just wasn’t talking well enough and from that we start to become very disorganized and messy. While walking off during halftime from these games, you can see it in all of our faces just how angry and disappointed we are in ourselves. But the best is when we come back from our bad places and we pick ourselves right back up and play a game that we can be proud of. On the other hand, I’ve had a couple of coaches that had a big impact on my life. Almost every single coach throughout all my years of playing have been very strict when it came to practices and games. Of course, all of us girls thought that they were just being assholes for the fun of it and to make of lives tough. But little did we know that in their own, what seemed to be crazy ways, knew that each tiring and complicated drill would help us and improve what we needed the most help with. My club coach was dedicated to my team, we were his whole life. This was his full time job, he managed South Kendall Sunblazers for several years. The club not only included my girls team but there were guys teams and girls teams of all ages starting from the ages of four all the way up to the age of nineteen. My coach was also known for getting girls scholarships for playing soccer in college. I was the only one on the team this past season who didn’t want to continue my career and play college soccer only because I knew that it was a lot of work and it took a lot of dedicated time that I just didn’t think I could give while I tried to focus on my studies and strive for a medical degree. He was shocked to hear this news because he thought that I could succeed in college ball but my mindset was somewhere else. But overall, joining soccer and laying for all these years was probably one of my best decisions. I not only learned so much throughout my years but I also got to enjoy myself and it was a place where I met people that I am till this day still friends with. It was a place for me to go and let out all my energy whether it was good or bad.
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