Personal Narrative: Joining Football

In my first year of high school, I didn’t quite know exactly what it was about. I wasn’t in any sports or clubs. My sister was the one who actually wanted me to join soccer. She wanted me to keep our last name going into high school. Sophomore year was the year I joined clubs and sports. I joined soccer, track, and AVID.When I joined AVID, they told me joining sports and clubs would benefit me if I was interested in going to college. That made me more convinced to join soccer. Joining soccer was one of the best things I could’ve ever done. It made me exponentially stronger, both physically and mentally. I took the leadership role and learned so many new things. I’m grateful that soccer has become a major part of my life. I played soccer sophomore and junior year in high school. My sophomore year was
actually the first year I played soccer on an official team for which I had to try out. I grew a lot as an athlete, and as a person that year. My junior year I was chosen as a team captain and as a team captain I had to lead practice, starting with warm ups and stretches to leading them on the field and yelling my lungs out. Sometimes practice was rough to the point that girls wanted to give up, but I always motivated them to do better and try their hardest. At the end of the day you are only cheating yourself or benefiting yourself, I would tell them.
When my coach had to leave early for work, instead of finishing practice early, I continued to lead practice, even if it meant taking the huge bag of balls home with me and bringing it to the school for the game days. We worked on stuff that would benefit us as a team and also individual skills. I gave my teammates advice about what to do on the field and we’d try it out to see if it would really work in the games. During the game when we would try out the routines and they actually worked, we’d feel so accomplished. By the end of the season, we only lost three games and for a team of beginners we did pretty good.
As a captain, I was responsible for many things. I had to start practice, explain what we had to do and if some girls didn’t understand, I would be the one to help them and lead them through the routines or even show them what had to be done if my explaining wasn’t good enough. If the girls needed extra practice, I would stay after practice to help them personally with whatever they needed, no matter how long they needed I would try my best to help them with what I know, from dribbling the ball, ball control, how to use your body, how to kick the ball, I tried my best t get them to their best. I was also in charge of having the girls’ names written down along with their jersey numbers before every game so the other coach and the ref would have one as well.
When practice ended late, I would go home, take a shower, and do my homework as fast as I could just sleep early. Although it was really tough sometimes and all I wanted to do was sleep, I pushed myself to do my homework and get my stuff done. I would sometimes go to sleep really late and I’d have to wake up early for school. It was probably one of the toughest things I’ve ever done and the most exhausting thing I accomplished. By the end of first semester, I had a 3.3 GPA with only A’s and B’s. I have never had good grades like that before and to have all that pressure on me was insane. By the end of second semester, I had a 3.5 GPA. Considering I was an athlete, I felt proud of my ability to balance the responsibilities of school with homework, projects, etc, work, late-exhausting nights, and being an athlete, dealing with my teammates and my coaches expecting so much from me. It was all worth it at the end of the season and at the end of the school
year.