How Soccer affects my life!

Soccer affects my life in so many ways. It creates memories, friendships, and it just makes you love the sport in so many ways after you've been playing it for so many years. I have been playing soccer since I was 4 years old on my first rec team. This is where I got to meet my first ever friends when I was in elementary school. Some of the friends that I created on this team are the friends that I had all the way up to my high school year. My dad was the coach of a rec team and I remember almost everything that happened or what we did for practices. These memories I believe will stay with me forever because it was something that I really enjoyed to do.

I then moved on after those years and I eventually started to play a travel league. This was almost the same thing as rec but it involved a bit more skill and it required a bit more traveling around the state to play in games and meet a variety of different teams. I played this all the way up until I turned around 12 years old. The majority of the players on this team were my friends on the first ever rec team that I played on and by this point we were all really good friends and made a lot of memories. We hung out a lot most of the time out of soccer and we all were really close in terms of all of our families. These years however were a bit slower because I started to get sick of the same soccer over and over again and I wanted to try something new.

This is when I eventually moved on to my Premier League. If you don't know what this is, its more like a league that you have to tryout for and its exactly the same as the professionals but its more for kids. This was a completely different time for me because it is totally different from the rec soccer that I used to play. In this league I was playing for more of the money side and we got supplied gear to represent a certain company and we were required to wear it when we played. The good thing about this team was that I didn't try out and eventually make the team while I was alone. I had a couple of my closest friends from the rec league come and join me on this premier team. This was different for me because I had to travel a lot. My practices were 3 times a week and they were out in Lancaster, MA. This is around an hour away from where I live and it was getting tough for the commuting. I stuck with it though for around 6 years. These were some of the best years of my life because I created a ton of friends from a whole bunch of other towns and I got to experience playing soccer against bigger and better people. This is where I learned to develop most of my skills in soccer and how I am able to actually do most of the stuff I do today.

Sadly, when High school starts the premier season ends for that ages. You can join again but it wouldn't be till your high school career is over and its when you start to go into the college phase. This happens because they encourage the premier players to go and play Varsity soccer for their school. It was good and bad that we had to leave but it was a hard decision in my life to make if I wanted to continue or not. It was good that I decided to leave it because the toll on our money as a family was going down because premier cost so much money and the traveling that we had to do for it was ridiculous also. I was traveling around the country and sometimes I even went to Mexico to go play the teams down there. The bad thing about not being able to play for premier anymore was because I knew that I would "lose my touch on the ball" which really means that I would eventually lose the skill that I had because I would stop playing with the skilled coaches that used to teach us all of this stuff and the very good players that I used to play with.

When I started High school soccer I made Junior Varsity my freshman and sophomore year but when I became a junior and senior I actually  made Varsity. Sadly the coach that became Varsity I never had a good relationship with and I went my entire junior year without getting hardly any playing time. My senior year I started out with an injury but because of this I haven't been able to play that much either. When I haven't gotten to play soccer in so long and I want to play but the coach doesnt want me to starts to get me really aggravated. I started to lose interest in soccer because of this and it makes me not want to play school soccer at all. The only reason I stay is because of the friends that I had on the team. I realized that if I did leave I would disappoint all of my friends and I don't want to do that. There is one thing that is getting me through the school season though. I made up my mind that I actually do want to join premier soccer again after high school at the start of my college years because I know that I will start to enjoy soccer again if I do and the coaches there are way better.

Soccer affects peoples lives in so many ways. These are some of the ways soccer has impacted me in my life and how I hope it does continue to affect me in the future. I plan on continuing to play soccer for premier or possibly college. I am so glad that I did end up playing soccer when I was a little kid because it helped me create the friendships that I have now and it really created me as a person and I hope it will continue to do that for the rest of my life.