Yesterday I received my first paycheck as a professional athlete. Fuck, I can’t beleive I just wrote that.

My parents gave thousands of dollars to support me in my soccer endeavors. Hundreds of hours spent watching me, supporting me even when I spent years on the bench as a substitute, not playing even a minute of some games. My dad wrote my high school coach after I didn’t make my Varsity soccer team my sophomore year. I watched my mother cry after seeing me spend those years on the bench, a boy with ambitious dreams but dreams that seemed unimaginable. I went from being the popular little blonde kid, known for his soccer abilities to a kid on the second team for his age group and still not being chosen in the starting 11. My sophomore year a boy who played on the first team from my club told me, “People used to see you as one of the best in your club and now look at you, you’re here playing JV as a sophomore, what happened?”. It was the only fight I got in in high school. The only time I ever got that mad was with an elderly man who played soccer with my dad.

The man told me how can you think you will play professional soccer when you’re small and scrawny and already too old. He said I should give up, because there are kids working harder and are given a better environment to be pro. He said, “look, you’ve got a zero percent chance”. I first started yelling at him, then pushing him, knowing this man was my fathers age I knew there was no way I can hit this man. But I’ve never come so close, my dad grabbed me and held me. I went to the side of the field with my dad and I started to cry. I remember telling my dad, “Ever since I was a little kid this was my dream, I can’t just let go of it.”. I wasn’t crying because the man hurt my feelings, I was crying because I was scared he was right.

I had people alongside me to make this dream become an ongoing reality. People who understood. I thought training hard, and a lot was all that gave me the right to deserve my dream, one of them my friend Reece who helped me prove otherwise. I found that it was a way of life, a life of having your priorities in place. It was about realizing that in order to make the 1% you had to train and live like the 1%. It’s about earning your dream, and realizing what it means to earn your right. Reece, my other buddy Nick and I trained together for a little bit until Nick left for the Navy. We swam a couple of times, but there was one swim day that I will never forget. We were in the deep end of the pool finishing a swim workout, and Nick said it would be a good idea to finish the workout with a 3 minute tread with our hands above our heads. All of us struggling to breathe after only about 2 minutes, coughing from accidentally breathing in water. Once the 3 minute mark came no one said a word let alone move towards the edge. After 5 minutes we all looked at our struggling faces and we laughed, but no one stopped or said a word. It was only about 35 minutes later that Reece literally started drowning (he was about 40 lbs. heavier than both of us). But no one quit, realizing the lifeguard will probably come rescue us at any moment we all agreed we would approach the edge together. We called out 3, 2, and 1. Our 3 minute tread turned into a 40 minute death match. That day I learned more about competition and determination than all my years on the soccer field.

Most people quit when shit gets hard. If you don’t quit then you’ll be the last one standing, the battle is then against yourself. When Reece and I would talk about this we would say, “Life is a game of attrition.”. The race to your goal is started with many by your side, but the farther you go the more time is spent by yourself. That’s where the real challenge is.

My soccer career at Albion started on the first team for my age group. At 10 years old I got cut and brought to the second team. From ages 11 to 15 I spent most of my time in games on the bench as a substitute. I didn’t make high school varsity until Junior year, I quit soccer for a summer because I lost hope. Came back full throttle in hopes of joining the NCAA UCSD soccer team. Played a season and got cut for “logistic reasons", played Club soccer where I suffered an MCL injury that set me back 3 months. Came back to the club team for my last two years at UCSD. I have embraced the underdog. I had the ultimate guide for that as well. My parents. Both Czech immigrants, my father escaping from communism in search for a better life, not knowing anyone and anything about the free world. My mother and later also father, working as a servant to an American family. My mother learned English and became a dean of a University, my father building a house in the most beautiful city in the world. The best thing about being an underdog is that you never have anything to lose, what’s the worst that can happen?

I’ve still got a long road ahead of me, and I am by no means calling myself a success yet, I just think that it is important to sometimes stop look around and see how far and why you’ve come.