I know all too well the agony of a defeat that should have been avoided. I was part of the AYSO league in my hometown, and I sort of dominated it for the last few years I participated. I joined a team late, winless through 2 games, and we won all the rest of the games to win the league. Next year my team just won all the games. However, I remember no game from these anywhere near as well as I remember the last game of my AYSO career.
We went down big, early. While going down by 3 goals would normally be a big deal in a game like soccer, and it still wasn’t ideal, but we had been in this situation multiple times over the course of the season. We oftentimes went down by a lot, once by 5 goals, but we always managed to storm back and won in the end. This was very different from the previous years where I and my team were scarcely challenged until the tournament of champions between all the different cities in the area.
However, there was one major problem this time. One of the two best players on the team was mentally out of it after that. Not me, I was busy trying to rally the team. But my strike partner got extremely shaken, despite him being th most physically gifted player on the team, with the most goals all year.
Still, we started to manage the comeback. We went down by one, I yelled “ONE MORE ROUND!” to my teammates as I had done multiple times before, but the 3rd quarter was running out of time. Yes, in AYSO there are quarters. And I knew that despite me being the best player on the field for the first 3 quarters, despite my strike partner being a black hole, my coach was going to take me off and not him. We got a corner and I ran down the field trying to hurry...but time ran out and I was taken off over my begging and pleading to stay on.
My team dominated the 4th quarter without me on the field, but we weren’t able to score and my strike partner continued to stink. We lost by one in my final game of AYSO soccer and I still remember it almost a decade later.
We went down big, early. While going down by 3 goals would normally be a big deal in a game like soccer, and it still wasn’t ideal, but we had been in this situation multiple times over the course of the season. We oftentimes went down by a lot, once by 5 goals, but we always managed to storm back and won in the end. This was very different from the previous years where I and my team were scarcely challenged until the tournament of champions between all the different cities in the area.
However, there was one major problem this time. One of the two best players on the team was mentally out of it after that. Not me, I was busy trying to rally the team. But my strike partner got extremely shaken, despite him being th most physically gifted player on the team, with the most goals all year.
Still, we started to manage the comeback. We went down by one, I yelled “ONE MORE ROUND!” to my teammates as I had done multiple times before, but the 3rd quarter was running out of time. Yes, in AYSO there are quarters. And I knew that despite me being the best player on the field for the first 3 quarters, despite my strike partner being a black hole, my coach was going to take me off and not him. We got a corner and I ran down the field trying to hurry...but time ran out and I was taken off over my begging and pleading to stay on.
My team dominated the 4th quarter without me on the field, but we weren’t able to score and my strike partner continued to stink. We lost by one in my final game of AYSO soccer and I still remember it almost a decade later.