Teaching, Coaching, Helping.
I was invited to be a guest coach with Gloucester Hornets girls 9-10yrs old. It was such a great reception and amazing outcome. One of my favorite things to do as a professional football player is teach and inspire young kids. I still remember when I was their age.
Growing up in Gainesville FL where soccer is a sport played for fun so the parents have something the kids can spend their weekends doing. For me and my parents it somehow became more than that. Since their were no travel team in my area my mother would drive me 2 hours each way to Orlando in order to be apart of a competitive league. From around the time I was 13 till 16 my mother sacrificed many days in order to drive me the 2 hours to Orlando as I slept across the back seats of our minivan. I still remember many times we had been at a tournament all day and the last game finished near 9 or 10 pm and she was exhausted from running me around. So by the age of 15 I would have to drive part of the way while she was able to rest a little bit also.
Somehow I had a soccer gene in my body that wouldn't go away no matter how many people told me it was difficult or how strange I may have seemed to most of my friends. While many of my friends pursued many different outlets in life; some even drugs and crime; I had no interest in most things in life except one thing, playing soccer.
All 4 of my brothers and even my sister use to play soccer also. When I was maybe 8 or 9 years old my brother and I had the task to rake up all the leaves in our front yard. We conjured a plan to rake them all into a little soccer field and play a game. It took over 1 hour to rake all the sidelines, 18 yard box, and center circle to perfect. We then spent the afternoon playing a game against each other and diving through all those perfect lines. It got a little late and my parents were not happy we had never completed our chore and in fact made a bigger mess, we then began to clean up the whole mess.
In every house we lived in my father would build a goal in the backyard for us and over the years as we grew we would eventually grow into a full field and full size goal. He also took us to our first professional soccer game in Orlando to watch the two MLS teams the Columbus Crew take on the Tampa Bay Mutiny. What an experience that was! Here I was watching players play that I had only seen on trading cards that I bought at the local card shop. Very rarely was soccer shown on TV so we didn't see much of soccer. But the stadium was full, and the field had players like Valderama, Brad Friedel, Brian Mcbride, and more. After the game we heard inside info that the players go a local bar after the game. Our family waited patiently and eventually were able to meet some players face to face.
While I was showing the Hornets girls some tips and signing a few autographs I noticed the same reactions and faces that I had when I first came in contact with professional soccer players. If only I can inspire a few kids to follow their dreams the same way I did, then my career is complete.
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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