an eerie silence fell across the stadium. The adrenaline of the game wore off all at once; the emotional pain hits me and doesn’t hold back. The game was over and we had lost again. But I was one of the lucky ones I still had one more year in high school. The mindset we had been raised with in our high school soccer culture was to beat Turpin.
We didn’t beat Turpin but still had the opportunity to make a state run. But our season was cut short with a loss in our first round game. It is, in my opinion our mindset that lost us that game. We didn’t beat Turpin so our season meant nothing to us, which was why we lost. But everything changed in my senior year; we focused on playing teams that would make us better playing against all types of teams. And it paid off, this time the whistle was our savior, it ended the twenty-three streak. Which of course made the team ecstatic, but what changed from last year was we knew this wasn’t the peak of our season. It was only one game on our way to state. After that game our season was very successful, winning titles that hadn’t been won in years. As a team we took our losses from prior years, and realized we couldn’t focus on a particular game, but had to broaden our minds and set bigger goals. All twenty-three years of our failures led to the success we had. They failed all those years because they had their minds set on beating Turpin, when all they needed to do was to set a bigger goal. Its not one game that makes a team great, it a season of games and how you attack them that makes a team
extraordinary.