Month: September 2023

“You have played soccer since you were able to walk” my mother has told me countless times, thanks to her, placing a ball at my feet at the time. Her reasoning for doing so originated from her love for the game since her father was a soccer coach for the El Salvador National team. I unsurprisingly do not recall this time of my life although she does have the pictures to prove it. Although, what I do remember is my first soccer team experience. It all began at the age of four in an indoor facility called “Players 360”, in Naperville. Here is where an intramural league with other children my age dressed in Superman capes and shirts whilst flailing around a miniature turf field with our parents bordering the sidelines. The innocent, fun, and wholesome intramural league was something I would have never expected to continuously evolve in level and seriousness as I progressed through life. 

I later became a part of the club NSA playing a year up in order to challenge myself and gain more experience. After playing here until roughly the age of nine, I moved on to the club team Chicago Fire Juniors. It was at this time when the price, distance, and effort required all began to amplify. Each soccer season often spanned for only half of a year yet costs one to two thousand dollars excluding tournament, travel, and uniform costs. We drove two times a week to a random field neighboring Plainfield South High School, roughly a 40-minute drive. Inconveniencing both my parent’s work day and personal life. I made the Academy team but after a change of role in the coaching staff, I saw the club dwindling in quality and decided to change clubs to Eclipse at the age of thirteen. A team that was exponentially growing and gaining popularity due to their success. This was both the best and worst decision of my athletic career. The coaches were strict, inconsiderate, and relentless. Each practice began and ended with a mile on top of scrimmages, drills, and speed conditioning mid-practice. The effort required to improve drastically increased as I was surrounded by much better players than myself. 

Did I become a better player? 

Yes.

 Did I become a better leader? 

Yes.

 But at what cost? 

I had lost my love for the game at this club, I became self-conscious about my soccer talents as I seemed to never surpass my teammates in skill level. I changed to Evolution soccer by the age of 15 where it was less competitive but also to be frank, boring. I thought the practices were too easy, redundant, and unenjoyable after I had become less interested in soccer. 

After just two years of soccer at the high school level and reaching my current age of seventeen, I searched elsewhere athletically. 

That is when I took on the challenge of starting the new sport of lacrosse during my Junior year of high school simply due to a friend’s recommendation. I was four months out of the high school season when that same friend who recommended I started lacrosse insisted I did box lacrosse if I wanted to make the varsity level. A form of lacrosse that was more similar to hockey in terms of game speed and roughness. So I did so, and it became my goal to make the varsity lacrosse team. I devoted those four months to practicing and learning the sport through film, the box season, and my older sister and brother who played lacrosse in college. But consequences arose, my grades began to slip, my social and personal life took a toll, and the majority of my time was spent on lacrosse and in the gym. Luckily, Come Spring, my efforts paid off and I made the varsity team, leaving soccer behind.

But was all the time, effort, and money that was put into soccer a waste? 

Was I letting down my mother after she made her desire for me to play soccer so clear?  

Were countless hours for nearly 90% of my life lost, and for nothing?

Thankfully, I believe I did not waste my time playing soccer although it may feel like that at the surface level. I think that as most sports do for others, it played a major role in my life by providing me with discipline, leadership, and a healthier, more active lifestyle. The sport was likely the main contributor to my character development, personality, and lifestyle. Having to aerobically condition and keep my body in its top shape aided me in my recent goal of making the lacrosse team and for personal confidence, gain, and health. I was able to prosper over the years due to the sport and relay my same competitiveness on the field to other aspects of my life such as my academics. I attribute most of my success thus far to soccer, a team sport which like other team sports has been shown to develop youth in a positive manner. A study backing this claim was published in the journal Pediatrics, where it states that “Participation in team sports results in a higher GPA for both high school boy and girl athletes. Physically active children are 15% more likely to attend college. Former student-athletes tend to earn significantly higher incomes than those who did not play sports. Student-athletes earn up to 40% higher test scores”. So as my personal experience and statistics show, playing team sports no matter the path taken or journey, more often than not will positively influence one’s life as a whole.

My earliest memory of reading dates back to roughly first grade, and it was more of a recurring event. Each night before bed, my father would read a book of our choice to my sister and me. 

Although, one series quickly became the most voted after we realized the potential of entertainment possible with just a book. This series was the “Berenstain Bears” written by Jan Berenstain and Stan Berenstain. The reason for the quickly gaining popularity between my sister Bella and me was due to my dad’s implementation of unique voices for each character in the book. For example, each time Small Bear spoke or “Baby Bear” as my dad would say, it was in a high pitched helium-filled like voice, for Mama Bear he for some reason shifted to a southern twang and dialect, whereas Papa Bear was a baritone, throaty, bass-filled voice. He was usually never able to read a chapter of the short children’s book without laughing hysterically and my sister and I more than reciprocated this. On top of the voices often came a reenactment of the scenes or random inclusion of one of our names alongside a subject not mentioned in the book to make us even more amused and caught off guard. By the end of the book, there were often tears streaming down our faces and we were more awake than when we sat down for bed. My mother would come into the room and yell at both my dad and us that we should be winding down for bed yet more often than not the fun often pursued. I recall feelings of joy, merriment, and gratitude for the times my dad, sister and I shared with literature. My father’s ability to bring to life and further personify the bear characters truly made each piece of literature a memorable and blissful experience. 

He attempted similar entertainment with other books; “Amelia Bedelia” by applying a posh British accent to each and every character with variation only coming based on the tone of his voice, “The Magic Tree House” consisted of more play on words, “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” series would seemingly never end given he imagined other things the mouse may want with each item, and the list goes on. But none of these efforts would ever top the “Berenstain Bears”. 

However, what each instance did teach me was the endless possibilities, value, and merit that literacy can provide. I was taught that words can be expanded into endless forms of entertainment via imagination, creativity, and a desire to learn more about the formalist, historical-biographical, and moral-philosophical approaches to reading. I believe to be a proper reader all literary approaches must be cycled in a text to gain further understanding, and at the same time, one’s imagination is often necessary for enjoyment as I learned firsthand at an early age. To this day, one of my least favorite parts of growing older would be the lack of Baby Bear, Mama Bear, and Papa Bear voices being used in readings as I  once heard each night thanks to the small times of leisure my father and I shared.