kkkrrrrrrrraaaaccccckkkk!!! ‘’What the heck is that?’’ It`s not the most painful injury I’ve experienced but it severely limited my mobility. The scary thing was that I had no idea what it was. A couple of things going through my head, ‘’All this work for this???’’ ‘’All my hard work and dedication for 20+ years and this is how the game repays me???’’ They say, ’you get what you put in’ but I’m starting to question the validity of that statement.
I`m sitting down on my couch aware of the MLS Draft 2013. Of all teams, there is really only one team on my mind. As a matter of fact, my dad and I had spent some time watching MLS the last couple years. We both came to the agreement that this one team played soccer in a way that resembled top European soccer, far more so than any other MLS club. I get a bunch of random texts congratulating me but I have no idea what they are talking about. Apparently, they got the news before I did, on Twitter, which I was not a user of. Not long after, maybe 10-15 minutes, I get an unknown call. I answer the call and someone notifies me that I have been drafted by the Seattle Sounders and he is asking me if I am ready to take a flight either that day or the next day. I was extremely shocked by how quickly they would expect anyone to make such plans. There was no way I was going to take the chance to say ‘no’ to a dream I always had since I was a little kid.
As long as I can remember, I was as addicted to the game as much as a kid can be, at least I think so. I would always spend time with a ball in the house, in addition to outdoor training and perfect different technical aspects of my game. Of course, as a kid it wasn´t the only game I played but it was easily far more than any other game, far more! I occasionally played football or basketball with friends in the neighborhood or at school. I do remember training with my dad very often on my soccer skills as a little kid but he never forced me. I always looked forward to it. I continued training a lot on my own, even when my dad was not present. Even when I left my family to go several states away for University, I continued to train a lot on my own because I wanted to become a professional soccer player.
Growing up I was never aware of how small the chances were of becoming a professional soccer player but I did pretty much everything I thought I could do to reach that level. Sometime in middle school my mom told me that the world is not a soccer ball, my response ‘’but it is round like a soccer ball’’. Her demeanor was serious, so I was smart enough in that particular instance to keep that response in my head. If my mom was telling me this as a kid, then I knew that I was on the right track in doing what it took to become a professional soccer player. Years later I would find out how true this statement really was but you know how kids are, I just took the statement at face value and never thought anything else of it. Too much for a typical middle school kid to comprehend. Besides playing, I used to spend a lot of time watching professional soccer. This helped me on some level to see what the best players at that time were doing, what made them special, and give me an idea of what I needed to train next time I went outside. Apart from that, I just loved watching the game. Although I was born in 1990, my football knowledge goes back as far as the 1950`s. This is because I have such an infatuation with the game that I do my own research reading and watching soccer games from as early as 1955. I have researched a lot on football history but I still have a lot to learn. To sum it up, I´m a soccer fanatic.
After playing soccer at club level, I attended the University of South Florida on a soccer scholarship. A division 1 school at the time and still is. They would regularly qualify for the NCAA Division 1 Championship and even won the conference championship, ‘The Big East’ the year before I got there which was arguably the best conference in college soccer. So having the opportunity to attend this school was no small feat. I was always a hard worker and I`m not being delusional either. As a freshman within my first few months there, less than 3 or 4 months, a senior on the team told me, ‘’Outside of Chipi, you are the hardest worker I have ever seen.“ Chipi was the senior captain on the team at the time and he truly worked hard. He also put in extra work outside of our regular trainings and he killed himself in team trainings. We trained 5-6 times a week throughout the season, 2 times a day during pre-season. In my mind, I thought, ‘no, I’m a harder worker, you just don`t see all the extra hard work I put in.’’ I didn`t tell him this but I did respect what he said. I took into consideration that, Chipi, was his fellow country man from Venezuela and they were very good friends. So if he saw what his very good friend was regularly doing after 3 years and he only saw what I was doing after a few months, I thought that statement means a lot. I remember one time as a junior, my coach joked during practice that they should make shirts with my face on it saying ‘Be like Kevin’ because I worked so hard in training. I was such a hard worker and willing to sacrifice to make it at the professional level. When my dad and I realized it was a possibility to get drafted by a team, we would do everything we could to not blow the opportunity. What we did for about a month before the draft was to do fitness drills that would keep me at the top of my game. All I did for about a month straight, 4-5 times a week, for a little over an hour was ‘run’. I mean this has nothing to do with anything else but running. I`m not talking about jogging or 80% jogging, I’m talking about full out sprints, cuts, and turns for an hour! Maybe about 3 water breaks for a few minutes before another long bout of sprinting. Before you think that I´m bragging here about how hard I work, I am trying to make a point and it will make a little more sense later.
After 3.5 years at the University of South Florida, sometime in January I get a call from the Seattle Sounders coach inviting me to take an immediate trip to the preseason as I have been drafted by the team. It seemed like destiny, of all teams my father and I were hoping I would be drafted by the Seattle Sounders. Being there was an amazing experience in terms of the professionalism of the program compared to anywhere else I’ve been. However, being drafted by itself meant nothing to me. I knew that being drafted was not the goal, nor was it a sign that I made it. It was merely an opportunity to take advantage of the situation and I approached each and every training with that exact mindset. After about a week the team traveled to Phoenix, Arizona for another week or two of preseason training and it was here where I would have my fall from grace. But not before what seemed like the closest sign to making the team without being told directly, that I made the team. While I was taking a break during one of the trainings a few days into the training camp, the assistant coach came up to me and asked, ‘’Kevin, if you were to come and join this team, how would you approach the situation, how would you handle yourself throughout your time here?’’ I told him, ‘’I would do everything, every single day, every single moment to give everything, every time I step on the field for the team and the organization. I would do everything I could do to improve every time.’’ To be honest, I felt even more strongly than words could describe. Not long after, all the seemingly good fortune up till now would change. Two days before the first preseason game I made a cut to change direction and I heard a crack in my back ankle ‘kkkrrrrrrrraaaaccccckkkk!!!’ I had no idea what this was but I had to immediately sit out. Two days later the same assistant coach that asked me what I would do if I was to join the organization is now asking how my injury was feeling. I gave him an answer he probably didn`t want to hear, ‘’I have no idea what it is, and there is no sign of it getting better after 2-3 days.’’ When it was time to head back to Seattle after the preseason camp in Arizona, I had a meeting with all the coaches and they told me they were letting me go. At the time, I didn`t really feel the hurt that I had until many weeks later when it still was not showing any improvement.
I used to ask myself, ‘’How could the game after everything I`ve sacrificed treat me so poorly??? For everything I gave the game it had given me so little!!!’’ I was bitter about this and extremely confused. You always hear people say things like ‘Hard work pays off’, ‘You get what you put in’, ‘Don`t cheat the game and you will be rewarded’. Unfortunately, in sports, these statement hold true maybe half the time or a little more but it is certainly not 100% factual! By no means am I discouraging anyone to become a professional. Absolutely not!! Many professionals would tell you this holds true and you can see that evidence by what they have achieved in their careers. On the other side, there are players like myself who will see how players who did not sacrifice as much as we did, playing at a professional level that we are not playing at and question what it all means. But for the accounted less than 2% of college athletes who do end up becoming a professional, it`s totally worth it (Hence why this article is for 98% of parents)!!! You should also be informed that there are players who win ‘MLS rookie of the year’ and end up becoming bench players for the rest of their career at that level. The point is there are hundreds of different stories and paths that can take place. I can tell you this, if I were a parent not only would I make an effort to not make sports a priority with my child, I wouldn`t waste a single ounce of energy stressing over my kids ranking, whether he/she is the star of the team, what position he/she is playing, did he/she have a bad game, or any other questions of the sort. I would do everything I can to make sure he excels if he pushes me to do so out of his own will but even more importantly I would hope that he enjoys what he is doing and where he is doing it. It`s not that kids should not work hard but I think if any kid, or person for that matter, is doing something they enjoy, they will naturally commit to it and work hard. As opposed to forcing a kid to work hard or hoping a kid will work hard. In addition, many great lessons can be learned from sports without going professional. Lessons that can be applied to other areas in life far beyond youth soccer, commitment and hard work being a couple of them. These days, I no longer think that the game cheated me or that the game gave me so little. On the contrary, what the game did do for me, was give me incalculable amounts of joy and it gave me an outlet to express myself in ways that I can`t do in many other areas of life. The game did more for me than anything I ever put into the game, so just let your kid enjoy the game.