After the Season with my first U14 team ended eight months later, the team was discontinued, and we all parted ways in April 2009. I had grown to like playing soccer so much that without thinking twice, I immediately began searching for a new team to register with.

I still did not identify myself as a goalkeeper, I had only dedicated myself to that position on the field because I was enjoying learning and playing soccer as a whole. I was already 14 years old at this time, and I would notice how nearly all my teammates (who were outfield players) had many more years of playing experience than me. This fact made me feel restricted by time, and I felt obligated to continue to exclusively play in the goalkeeper position. I limited myself by allowing what my eyes would see in my social soccer environment, to dictate my decisions for me. I had perceived that it was way too late for me to learn and strive to play an outfield position, like I unexplainably had been feeling attracted to.

New Club team & Cold Realizations

Two months later during the summer of 2009, I was fortunate enough to find and join a new team. I presented myself as a goalkeeper. This time, the level was way different, and I excitedly sensed it.

My new team was a U16 travel team that took part in a labeled competitive league. The step up was big and I was ecstatic thinking that I belonged there, integrating into a quality team. I was very excited for the upcoming challenges and the progress that would tag along with those challenges. At 14 years old, I was still in the gradual process of learning the principles of how to pass a ball, while simultaneously learning the goalkeeping basics. This new team consisted of more than a dozen experienced players, most being 15-16 year old. Many of them had been playing together since elementary school. Generally speaking, empathy and rational temperament are not strong nor common skills found in teenagers, as I found that out through firsthand experience. Little did I know, this would be the start of life-long memorable defamation stage coming from this new exposure of social environment .

In as little as less than a month, newfound hostility was formed towards me from about half of the team. It was not hard to notice. I became a main source of causations of impatience and frustrations from many teammates during practice, and it was due my lack of soccer competence compared to theirs. Mockery and other humiliating slurs would be directed to me from a fair few teammates, enough for it to become a norm. It shortly began to spread off the field too. The gathered negative remarks that would enter to fill my head were becoming more crystalized in my thoughts. Even though I agree with the majority of what they had to say about my soccer abilities back then, the continuity of add-on insults, hostile tones of voices, deeming remarks, and evasive body language were what carried the most weight, in my opinion. I STILL LOVED training soccer and always seeking to improve in it, THAT I've never had a drop of doubt about it.

The club season began about 3 months later. My coach at the time made a favorable suggestion to sit me out of the competitive league games for the first few months, and in the meantime heighten my preparation in training. A sound proposal that I agreed to. The season went on and I diligently attended practice. After about 5 months, I was given some chances to start certain competitive games. I was continuing to develop my soccer self in a mostly negative social environment that was coming from a handful of teammates. This reality resulted in me loving to play soccer ONLY in practice. I became extremely fearful and resentful when I would be named the starting goalkeeper some games, or when I would come into a game as a substitute goalie.

I was feeling highly susceptible to committing costly mistakes every time I had to get involved in a play. Throughout the entire length of every game played, my teammates, coaches, opponents, parents, and other spectators would second-handedly sense the high levels of nervousness and fear that would radiate themselves from my inside out, and express themselves in my body language.

During my first 2 years with my second team, I have no doubt in my mind that I had made nearly every costly and crucial goal-leading mistake in the goalkeeping books, from every angle. Some include:

• Scored on from half-field during kickoff right after my team had scored the leading goal

• Misjudged bounces over my head and into the goal from other goalies' punts

• Gifting free headers to unpressured opponents

• Fumbled catches that lead to various open goals

• Gifting open goals to opponents from botched passes in the penalty area

• Many more similar and relatable

High school soccer

I took part in my high school team in my sophomore year exclusively. Shockingly, there were five official goalies on the roster (myself included) that year of high school soccer. I was the last choice goalkeeper and did not step foot on the field for a formal game during the entire season (in which I was in an odd way grateful for, because I felt it had saved me from further humiliations, especially in front of my high school peers).

I was very happy to be able to have an extra overload of soccer practices during the 5 months of high school season. It was great training with my club team three days a week while also being training with the high school team 3-4 days a week. Many of those days were back-to-back practices, one after the other. That was pleasurable.

The verbal defamation from teammates toned down after the first 2 years, and it was pretty much history by the time I reached my senior year. Seniority status on the team was helping and I was more socially engaged with nearly all of my teammates by this time. Newer players were joining and claiming more spots on the roster, while the majority of the original group of offensive peers had left left the team by then. Even though the verbal abuse had ended and my soccer techniques had improved greatly by that time, the unwanted emotions of fear, anxiety, and self-doubt were still implanted into my conscious. Those inner feelings in me did not ever diminish.

College soccer

These negative emotions and thoughts about myself as a soccer players tuck and accompanied me throughout all of my five years of college soccer. I kept on searching for (and finding) noticeable marginal improvements in my own soccer techniques, emotions, and physical attributes throughout college. My mentality about myself as a soccer player was still a confused and uncertain one. The lack of success in my tactical approaches when attempting to delete and overcome my programmed self-doubt was not making the same positive progress as everything else, if any.

My interest in playing as an outfield player had never vanished from my thoughts either. Not even after completing the duration of my collegiate soccer career from 2013-19. Throughout those years, I still felt very condemned to play the goalkeeper position exclusively. I was considered a goalkeeper on paper in the roster and from my playing position, yet I did not ever truly define myself as on. No matter how much I enjoyed being a goalkeeper during practice, nor how many times I envisioned myself overcoming my emotional burdens and achieving my own vision of success as a goalkeeper, my attraction to training as an outfield player only grew.

Since freshman year of college, I dedicated myself to designing and trial-and-erroring various experiments that related to my soccer performance and development. These experiments were tested in many isolated training sessions with just my ball. This became an obsession. Training alone has been what kept my mind from permitting the past and current (back then) circumstances from further infecting my thoughts and ideas about who I was as a soccer player. I did not train any goalkeeper specific drills or simulations during these isolated personal training experiments, rather, they consisted of various routines and drills that ALWAYS involved technical work with the ball at my feet (like an outfield player would). Obsessively training alone became a daily system. I was loving it too much! When I would train alone, there would be nothing but positive self-affirmations and encouraging statements coming from me, to me. A complete flip of the switch when I compare it to my past soccer social environments; the environments that gave me countless experiences of playing with gruesome anxiety and nerves that preceded massive mistakes and embarrassments.

Those hundreds of hours training my techniques, emotions, mentality, physicality, and tactics of approach in isolation, paved the way for higher motivation, enthusiasm, and most importantly, SELF-CONFIDENCE in me as a soccer player. Slowly, I realized how much more beneficial and fun this newly arising mentality about myself as a soccer player was. This new growth mindset shifted me in a much more positive direction. My "ah-ha" moment came when I realized that my performance and development had so much to do with the THOUGHTS THAT I HAD PERMMITED INTO MY HEAD.

Apart from my rookie year in 2008 and my high school senior year, I was permanently the last choice goalkeeper in team all of the teams that I played goalkeeper for during my 10 years of playing as it.

TECHNICAL:

I lacked basic knowledge and execution of fundamental techniques when I was 13 years old. Passing, dribbling, controlling the ball, and shooting. I was years behind my teammates, which generated a lot of frustration from them. As a goalkeeper, I lacked confidence in catching air balls and I was very fixated and biased about attempting to make every save a diving save in any game situation. Even when the required action to save the ball from going in the net did not require a diving save at all, I would attempt to dive. This was because making legitimate diving saves was my attribute of strength. This accounted for many goals being scored on me, due to not knowing or the proper saving techniques for specific-game situations.

EMOTIONAL:

I felt extremely neglected from my teammates, and extremely nervous in official games. Originally, I did not want to be a goalkeeper, although I grew a certain appraisal and appreciation for the goalie position. Deep in my conscious, I knew that I had more interest in learning to be an outfield player instead of a goalkeeper. I felt trapped by my thoughts and felt unable to publicly express my desire to work towards what I really wanted, and it was because of my own limiting beliefs that came from my highly-leveled self-doubt. This self-doubt definitely derived from me believing the constant negative attacking statements directed towards me from many of my teammates while I was in my the beginning of my soccer developing stage.

MENTALITY:

I enjoyed participating in the practice days so much more than I did participating in official season or friendly games. In practice, I was under much less pressure of making a mistake. I knew that I would get a lot more repetitions doing my favorite diving saves during practice than I would during a real game. The best part was that I could do so without the pounding pressure and fear of making a self-sabotaging mistake that would turn into a goal, or even worse, trigger the darker side of my teammates against me. I hoped and gave sighs of relief before and during every game that I would ride the bench in. I felt so much more safe and calm on the bench watching my teammates take the responsibility of playing. Tie, win or lose, I didn't care much because I would be free from verbal assaults. Rather than reflecting and generating the typical expected feelings of motivation and drive to want to play with me team and aim to help them win, I would feel content being free of accountability and verbal exploitations by weekly sitting on the team bench. Nevertheless, I still trained with the purpose of improving, because of my love for the game. When game day would come, all that training, motivation, and self-confidence basically went out of the window because of my overpowering self-doubt and lucid thoughts of me making a goal-costing mistake.

PHYSICAL

Out of all of the things that I realized were in my control besides my input of attitude, work-rate, and decision-making, my physical performance training demonstrated results at a much faster pace when compared to any other factor of the T.E.M.P.T. acronym. The positive results in progress from physical training came a lot faster than the results from the technique trainings and the comprehension of game-simulating tactics (which that would also have a domino effect in the vulnerability of my mentality and the taking a toll on my emotions towards soccer). Learning this personal realization was somewhat discouraging since I perceived it as another justification of the comments and remarks that I had heard about my soccer incompetence throughout my developmental years. Agility had been a strength of mine, which helped my extended diving saves become my biggest and most cherished goalkeeping strengths, despite my below average height for a goalkeeper. Naively, I thought and hoped that all appraisals that would come my way in an official game would come only from making picture-perfect diving saves. I struggled largely with catching the ball , kicking, and catching air balls, so I chose try and mask my lack of these basic goalkeeping techniques with my physical attributes of agility, reacting, and leaps that made up my extended diving saves. This resulted in me saving the majority of strong long and short range shots. In realistic game situations, those opportunities would come only about 15% of the time, so It was not much help. Basically, I was unknowingly leaving myself unprepared for the majority of real game situations that every goalkeepers will traditionally encounter. I created an immense form of self-sabotage by accepting a fixed mindset on this view. My mind was wired by my own self, to save every ball in the game with an extended diving save, as if it was nonnegotiable. This fixed mindset stuck around with me through most of college soccer also.

TACTICAL

I would constantly brainstorm ways to improve my mental and physical state. My rising love for soccer drove me to invest numerous hours training in isolation by choice. I trained myself very often by going outside and juggling the ball, creating mini challenges for myself, and incrementally striving for tougher ones. I practiced trial-and-error in many habits and routines. A few examples include trying loads of different:

• sleeping schedules

• intensity levels of drills/exercise

• meal times, certain meal types, and certain diet phases

• locations

• equipment

There are so many ways of doing the same things that I had the urge to try everting that I could with the resources at my reach. My moments training alone was what helped me start to unfold mental clarity. I would enjoy and appreciate all the positive self-talk and thoughts that I would have with myself when training alone. Fast forward more than a decade later, and all of the memories of my internal soccer insecurities have not left. Those memories they are there to stay because they have now evolved into memories that make up my biggest self-affirmations. Thy serve me as reminders that through persistent repetition of our passions, taking self-care actions, goal-setting, and resilience, I was able to find my purpose and life calling of setting up our youngest soccer-loving generations with effective guidance that will lead to their optimal development in the healthiest and most balanced manner.