Growing up, I guess I was like most kids: I loved playing sports. Softball, basketball, anything my brothers would let me play with them, I was there for it. But from a very early age, my passion for soccer shone through every time I touched the ball. At six years old, I was garnering fouls left and right from referees telling my coach to sub the "overly-aggressive” girl with the bow in her hair while my mother had to deal with upset parents from opposing teams furious that their children were being literally plowed over in Recreational Soccer. In my defense, their kids were in my way and what else was I supposed to do? Politely ask them to move?
At 8 years old, a pair of goalie gloves was strapped onto my tiny hands. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. That hot day in June at Magruder Middle School is one that will probably stay with me forever. I felt as if I had been given a superpower. I picked up on goalkeeping quickly. It felt as if I had been made to dive from flying soccer ball to flying soccer ball. And the fact that I was being praised for bossing my teammates around felt too good to be true. Also, on that day, I met one of the people who would have a huge impact on my life, my goalie trainer, Big Joe. He would go on to stick with me through the many highs and lows of the next ten years of the crazy conundrum that was my life with soccer.
Soccer brought me the single-best moments of my childhood... and the absolute worst. I learned quickly that being a goalie wasn’t all that easy. Yes, I had a superpower, I was special, and I could do things that other players couldn’t. Different skills, different practices, different mentalities, a goalkeeper is totally separate from the rest of the team. Yet, they are the glue that can either keep the team together or be the cause of it falling apart. In my games, I was either the reason that my team was able to pull out a win or the sole cause of us going home as losers. The job could be tough, but I knew I was tougher.
I had the same head coach for five years. He and I had an incredibly tumultuous relationship for much of those years, but at the end of the day, if there is one single person on this Earth who has forced me to learn about myself and my strengths and weaknesses and forced me to grow from them, it's him. He taught me what it meant to work hard and to want something so bad that I would do anything to achieve it. He calls it being an “angry worker,” but I wasn’t an angry worker- I was the angriest worker. In my ten years of being a goalie, I was never the goalkeeper with the rawest talent. I was certainly never the tallest and I was often put into situations where the odds were stacked against me- but I didn’t care. I had something that my opponents didn’t and that was the better work ethic. Yes, I was out-skilled many, many times, and over the ten years of being a goalkeeper, I was cut twice and sustained five severe concussions which were both experiences I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.
Being cut at 11 years old caused me to lose every small ounce of self-confidence my middle school self had and with every concussion brought hardship and unexplainable pain to my family and I. But after every setback, every time I fell down, (literally and figuratively) no matter how great the pain, quitting was never an option.
RDB: Rocks Don’t Bruise. One of my personal life mantras came out of one of my lowest moments in life. After my first severe concussion at age 12, I was misdiagnosed with a contusion because the damage to my brain was too severe to detect at that time. I texted my coach that it was just a contusion and that I would be fine. “I didn’t know rocks bruised,” he said. “They don’t,” I responded. This is who I was. I was a rock. You could plow through me, you could cut me just because I was too “short,” you could take a team that I had helped build for six years away from me, but I was a rock and I could withstand anything. I was a warrior- the angriest of workers- and to be honest, I just didn’t give a damn because mentally I was tougher than the rest.
Yes, I was mentally and physically tougher than everyone else in my own mind, but physically my body couldn’t withstand everything. My junior year of high school I had my heart set on playing DIII college ball on the East Coast. I knew I wasn’t as good as I had once been pre-concussions, but I was good enough, and all of my friends who I had trained with since I was young were all planning on playing college soccer. I had worked just as hard and I was going to see my hard work rewarded no matter what I had to do to get there. ...Then came soccer's final blow to me- my fifth and final concussion in December of my junior year. Devastated doesn’t begin to describe how I felt, and luckily/unluckily my family was going through a really hard time with my grandma’s cancer so the pain of not playing was temporarily gone.
It wasn’t until many, many months later that I finally gained some closure on letting go of the thing I loved to do most in the world: put on my Copa cleats with bright pink sweet-spots on top, unstrap my green Reusch gloves, and my signature pink jersey with the number 1 on the back, and my lucky Nike headband with my hair in a braided ponytail. My favorite “outfit” I ever wore and probably ever will. It embodied me and who I was to a T: sassy, girly, and a total fighter who didn’t care what she had to do to get the result she wanted.
That’s the thing about the athlete that used to be- she didn’t care. She was often selfish and put what she thought was best before what her team needed her to do. She fought with her coach because she thought that she had all the right answers. She put soccer as her number one priority even though she swore she wasn’t like “the other girls” whose lives revolved around soccer. She pretended like she didn’t care what others thought, but in reality, her entire ego was based on how she played or didn’t play during her most recent game. She was so hard on herself it was incredibly unhealthy and her selfishness often caused a wedge between her parents and her. They supported her through everything- every concussion, every cut, every time she had a bad game. They paid for her to have private sessions with various goalie coaches and made sure that she had the very best medical treatment possible from all the many many health issues her concussions caused. But still, she said it wasn’t enough. She wanted to play and when the doctors said "no more," she blamed them. She didn’t put God first. In fact, her only semblance of God was when she needed him for a win or to play well in her games. She failed to thank Him after said games were won or the result she wanted was achieved. Basically, that athlete that once was, she was often times the worst version of myself.
And yet, I look back and think of some of my happiest memories: being a huge reason my team won a major Southern California tournament and earning my place back on the team I had worked so hard for, the incredible teammates I was blessed enough to meet and play with for so long, and more than anything the coaches that taught me the lessons necessary to help me become the person that I am today. My goalie coach, Big Joe, was always there for me and he loved and supported me through all of it- always stressing the importance of faith to me, and to this day from afar, still plays a huge role in my love for teaching and coaching kids. My coach, who for the longest time I could never understand, ended up being a huge reason why I stayed involved with soccer after I stopped playing, allowing me to coach alongside him and helping me to understand that even though his methods weren’t always the most conventional, every time he pushed me too hard or made a decision I didn’t agree with, he truly did what he thought was best for me and my team even when I didn’t see it.
That “superpower” I discovered all those years ago never left me just because I stopped playing. It grew into my passion for helping others realize their potential and gave me reasons to believe in myself. At the end of the day, I am still capable of being the angriest worker. I am still that crazy six year old not caring who or what I had to go through to achieve my goal. I will always have the heart of a goalkeeper, the rare breed that we are. And truthfully, when I see many of my former teammates I trained with for so many years playing at their various colleges, I don’t get a pang of jealousy. I know that my creator made me for more than just serving myself- He made me serve others. RDB. I will forever view myself as tougher than the rest, but not because I have no weaknesses, but because I will forever embrace the flaws that soccer taught me. I have and continue to build on the strengths it unlocked during all those years-The athlete that once was, as great as she was to watch on the field, and the player I am now off the field, is pretty darn amazing.
