"Somewhere behind the athlete you’ve become, and the hours of practice, and the coaches who have pushed you, is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back. Play for her.”- Mia Hamm
We have all heard this quote a million times. What it could mean to you could be completely different than what it means to someone else, but there is going to be one thing in common about every girl who is affected by this quote: at one point in your life, you dedicated yourself to a sport and after you started playing, that is all you ever wanted to do.
When you are a little girl, your parents sign you up for basically everything imaginable because you need to try it all. When you are trying every sport under the sun, sometimes you just click with one. The sport, whether it be dance, softball, basketball, etc...whatever it is becomes all you want to do and you fall madly in love with it. Your sport will be your first love and you will love it even after your time on the field, court or stage is over.
After you find that perfect match and you fall in love, you stop caring about all of those other sports that your parents are making you do. You might still play them to be with friends but you do not focus on them like the one you love.
When you are a little girl who has fallen in love with a sport, it becomes your passion. You always watch it on television and your parents always take you for extra lessons or clinics or anything that allowed you to play and become better.
After a while of things being fun, you want things to get more competitive. This is when you try out for travel teams. That try out can be the most nerve racking moment of your life but when remember why you are there, it is all worth it, especially when you get the call later in the week saying that you have made it.
Once you start to play travel, things get a lot more serious. Maybe not so much at the younger ages because you are still learning the game and having fun but the travel and the practices and the games become a lot more serious. There can be days where you do not play at all because you are having a rough patch. This is when you need to dig down and play for the little girl that fell in love with the game.
You will come across coaches that make the sport that you loved so much and turn it into a nightmare. Girls on your team may not like you and they can make it hard to go to practice. Parents can talk about you behind your back even though you are just a little kid. All of these words and nastiness and things that make you hate your life just have to be like water off a duck’s back. Trust me, a girl who I played with once told me this when all of the words being said made me want to quit the game. Again though, when you come to this point, you have to remember why you play. It is for the love of the game and that is it.
As you get older, competition gets harder, tournaments get bigger and colleges start looking at you, it can cause you to crack. Things start to be not so much fun anymore because you are so worried about playing in college, you forget that you are playing now. People start to put more pressure on you too because they want to see you be successful. These people only see the girl that is standing and playing before them though, they do not see the little girl that you once were just learning to play the game.
When your career is finishing, whether it be high school or college, you will look back and think of all those times that you were on the field. The memories and friendships that you have made that will last you a life time. When your time is finally coming to a close and you stop worrying about the little things, you start to remember why you play. Every time you think of why you play, you will think of that little girl who fell in love with the game.
No matter what you may have fallen in love with, for me it was softball, it will become the best thing that has ever happened to you. Trust me, my time is not yet done because I have a couple years ahead of me, but every once in a while when things get hard and I start to question what I am doing I think back to the little girl I used to be that spent all day playing catch or hitting off the tee in the yard. Once I think back to that, I realize that I could never not play for her. Every athlete has their little girl inside of them, make sure you are playing for them because in the end, no one else really matters.
