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In order to accurately view my life, one needs to understand the impact the sport of soccer has had on it. My father named me after his favorite soccer player and I started watching soccer when I was just two years old in video cassette tapes my father kept of the old World Cups, setting the tone for the rest of my life. I idolized the legendary Diego Maradona growing up, and first dreams were to become a soccer player. I was very, very good and tore my local recreational league apart. I vividly remember crying the first time watching the documentary Once in a Lifetime about soccer’ popularity in the 1970s, wishing I could live in a world where more people understood the joy I feel about soccer. I never had many friends, the soccer field was where other kids understood me and there was this sense of camaraderie being part of a sports team not felt in any other group setting. I played competitive soccer for a while but never kept at it, it ruined the fun for me. As time goes on, you get a good idea of how the world works and I soon figured out that I was not going to become a professional soccer player. Soccer was still a fun activity that I spent a significant amount of time and energy on. However, I lived in a part of the Bay Area filled with very competitive schools and that eventually caught up to me.
I breezed through elementary school but most of my grades skydived when I entered middle school. My grades were so bad I would not have gotten accepted to UC Santa Cruz if the trends continued. Even though my freshman year of high school saw an improvement in my grades, soccer was sapping my energy and I really wanted to go to a good college. I was at a crossroads in my life: should I keep playing soccer and hope to improve my grades or quit soccer and spend more time on school.
Ultimately, I decided to stop playing soccer. Quitting soccer seems like a normal event to most people but soccer is a part of my soul, most of the friends I made and old memories I have are playing soccer. Even though I would have to stop playing eventually, I could always delay it and try to ease myself into it. However, I saw the event as a galvanizing moment in my life where I started to turn my academic life around.
The first two years there was a void in my weekends but my grades improved. I started looking at other hobbies in my spare time. I started following politics and watching the PBS Newshour every night with my father. I also spent time over one summer going to a tutor for help with my writing, time I normally would have spent playing soccer at a camp.
My love of soccer barely faded in spite of quitting; I still watch soccer on weekends with my father on television and started collecting and analyzing soccer statistics in my spare time. My interest in Computer Science, my major, actually started with me just surfing the web for soccer statistics and me trying to aggregate them into a manageable format. This lead to me learning Java and how to web scrape, which is my main specialization. I found some really interesting statistical tidbits and published some articles online. While most of my friends go to Computer Science with the goal of learning how to play games, my driving force is to learn how to do statistical analysis which I would use for soccer and maybe politics or another interest I develop while at UC Santa Cruz.
Ultimately, quitting soccer is an open-ended story with room for interpretation; sometimes, I feel good about my decision, other times I regret it. On one hand, it may have got me into college, and on the other hand, I really missed playing soccer. Life is not simple, the choices we have to make are hard and sometimes we will never know if we made the right decision, and ultimately that’ the moral I glean from my decision to quit soccer.