Late nights, Early mornings, Hours of work. Soccer has been a massive part of my life. It is something that I have spent countless hours doing. Ever since I was a three–year–old, it has been one of the things I love the most. The practices that start at 8:30pm, those away games where you have to leave at 5:30am to get there in time for warmups, and the out–of–state tournaments where you screw around with your teammates and order four pizzas to the lobby after the team curfew. These are some of the greatest times of my 17 years on this earth. It’s not always sunshine with sports though. Having an awful game or practice, feeling like your coach just won’t get off your tail, and having to sit entire seasons out due to injuries. It gets tough at times, games where the weather is awful. Cold, windy, raining, snowing, or all of those together. You name the weather, I have probably played in it. One thing that makes all the hard parts of soccer go away immediately is when that one kid on the other team starts to trash talk you. It makes me immediately forget my bad mood and I get so happy because I know that kid just messed up. For example, during my freshman year of high school, my school team made it to the regional championship game. The weather was just awful, it was 40 degrees, rainy, and very hard to see. This one kid on the other team kept talking to me, he was able to tell I was a freshman by how young I looked and my oversized jersey because freshman get last pick. Anyways, he kept saying things to me that I can’t repeat in this paper, and poking and stepping on my ankles on purpose. He said so many jokes about me being a freshman, but in the 62nd minute of the game it was tied 3-3. My teammate passed me the ball on the ground and I decided to just rip it from 30 yards out. The ball skipped beautifully on the turf and dinged off the post in the bottom right corner and into the back of the net. I have never celebrated a goal as much as I did this one. I ran back to half after and when I passed that kid, I just looked at him and said nothing. That ended up being the winning goal. After the game, my teammate, who was a senior, pointed to me and said to that guy, “that little freshman right there just ended your season buddy!” All the hours of work I put in and almost wanting to quit many times, it was all worth it in that moment. Putting in tons of work to get a seemingly movie–like result is the most rewarding thing I can imagine.