Lessons From the Field: Rediscovering My Drive

I have never been a goal scorer. On the field I’m scrappy, chaotic, flailing. A former soccer coach once said I resembled a cat in a blender. Old teammates used to tell me I looked like I was swimming on the field, with my swinging limbs and sweeping movements. I never took offense, because it was true. Throughout my years of competitive soccer, I was often falling on the field. Elbows out, teeth gritted - I was always accumulating new wounds over old ones on my knees.

As a center-midfielder, I learned quickly how to distribute the ball. I understood my role in the game well. Give and go and get out of there. I was a passer, an accomplice. I rarely put my head down and dribbled with the intention to score. I never wholly believed in my capability to take control and drive a shot at the net. I was the girl always making a pass in the 6-yard box.

The calculated touch I craved with the ball did not come naturally to me - only on rare occasions when I summoned some resolute force inside of me. At 10 years old, I’d slip out of my uniform after school and lace up in the backyard. With my iPod Nano clipped to my waistband and headphones blaring The Black Eyed Peas, I’d try to juggle the ball 100 times without dropping it. “It’s muscle memory,” my Dad used to say, and I took his words to heart as I drilled myself over and over until the golden hour was a bluish haze and my mom was calling for dinner.

I’m 25 years old and I can still taste the feeling. Adult coed soccer league could never replicate the glory and adrenaline of my teenage years, but I remember them like a fever dream. The souvenir turf burns on my knees, the panic, the stakes, the exhilaration you feel when the outcome actually counts for something.

While hovering in the player box, my energy spikes, like I’m prepping a space shuttle for takeoff. I can feel my engine revving, gears turning. I’m on a new field now, in a new city with new faces, and I even feel like I’m in a new body. All I want in this moment is to breathe like I am chasing something meaningful again. There are echoes of my dad all around me here. I haven’t played a game that matters in years. 

I catch a memory of the last true competitive indoor soccer game I ever played. Even then, I knew the magnitude of that moment and its finality. I sat on the rubber floor for a long time, sweaty and slumped against the wall, wondering what to do with myself, unable to process a life without a team, a coach, and a game, a real game. 

The gate swings open and I fling myself onto the field, moored by a steady stream of passion that’s been boiling inside me since that day. And just like that, I score two goals. Somehow, it happens. Somehow, I’m revisited by the feeling. In theory, a goal here means nothing - in the end we all go upstairs and drink beer, and no one really remembers the score. But I swell with pride and high five my new teammates, remembering something I think I once forgot.

There are no stakes without drive, no goals without trying. You can never lose your aliveness when you’re running around for something you love. Today I am a goal scorer.