My field hockey season

 The biggest conflict I faced this season was personal. I have been told my whole life by even my closest family that “Some people just aren’t that good at sports. You need to be more aggressive when you play sports and we just aren’t very aggressive people”. When someone says something limiting to me, I am quickly encouraged to prove them wrong. In my life, I have tried soccer, softball, tennis, basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, field hockey and more. In all of these sports I felt the weight of just not being good enough and aggressive enough. I always feel that I am one of the worst and maybe I’m not a sports person. But, the thing is, I love to play sports. I don’t love being pushed or hit, but I enjoy competition and the way sports are played. Many of these other sports I eventually quit. I never thought that I would still be playing two sports in highschool. Recently, I have grown up a lot and gained a lot of confidence. I realized that when pushed, you just need to push back. In sports you can’t worry about people’s feelings and try to be nice and make everyone happy all the time. When I went to field hockey camp this summer, the coaches lifted me up and made me feel as if I was good at something for once. They told me that I could definitely make varsity this year and maybe even play in college if I wanted to. When I set the goal to make varsity, I knew I had to put everything into it. Although it probably doesn’t sound like such a big deal to most people, coming from a not very athletic family who didn’t play many varsity sports in high school, it is almost as if I am paving a path as I have no one before me to live up to. When I made varsity, it was one of the first times I thought I could be good at something competitive. I felt invincible. I was delighted when I was able to start and play throughout the whole of most games. Our game against SB however took a big toll on me. I was having a rough day and wasn’t thinking about field hockey at all. When I went onto the field, I wasn’t ready to play a game. When my coach noticed this, she took me out and put someone else in. The feeling of shame and defeat I had in that moment was real. I felt like I had let my teammates down, I had let my coach down, and I had let myself down. When she tried to play me again, I was flustered and all my hard work went to waste. It was in that game that I lost a lot of confidence and reached my low point of the season. I had to take a step back and think about what I was doing and what was causing my sudden failure. I had to remember why I started playing field hockey in the first place. I had to remember why I had tried so hard to make varsity. I had to think of the fifth grader who picked a field hockey stick for the first time in the hope that she would be good at something. After lots of self-reflection, I finally began to build back what I had lost. After losing painfully to SB, I was scared when our quarterfinal game was against them again. It wasn’t until I walked back onto their field, with so much more pressure on my shoulders than the first time, that I was terrified. I had terrible deja vu to my feelings of embarrassment and defeat that had occurred only weeks before. I felt that it would easily happen again, and maybe the pressure I felt today would be too much for me. I had a terrible feeling and started shaking with tears in my eyes. My coach asked how I was doing, and I told her the truth. I said “I’m scared that this will be a repeat of our last game here, my worst game.” She told me not to think about it. Today was a new day. My captain also reached out to see if I was okay. The worst part was that my friends on the team didn’t notice, or didn’t care. I felt alone. I told myself that I was a different person since the other game, and I was going to prove it. I played that game as well as I possibly could, and although I was hesitant at first, by the second quarter I had started to build my confidence back, and by the end of the game I realized that I wasn’t a different person from the last game. I was just me, who had a bad game a few weeks before. Even though we lost, I left the season with a sense of personal victory that I had beat my own demons.