Personal Narrative: My Last High School Soccer Game

Last High School Soccer Game
Mitchell Schmalzer
9-16-10

Soccer, the sport I started playing when I was four years old. After almost 14 years of playing the sport I loved, we were playing Ocala Vanguard in the District tournament for my high school soccer team, Leesburg; if we lost it would be game over for me and my 15 other senior teammates. We knew we had to play strong just to have a chance against them, and oh what a game it was. February 12, 2010, it was time to put that Leesburg orange and black jersey on. We stepped off the bus at the Vanguard stadium in Ocala; I could hear the screaming fans cheering on the teams that were already playing before us. I walked along the concrete path toward the stadium entrance with my soccer
It’s that mentality that gets in your head that you are winning and you should not try as hard; we played very sloppy soccer in the second half and I myself didn’t run as hard as I had in the previous half. Vanguard came out with a chip on their shoulder and anger inside their bodies. They attacked us from all angles and played like how they were supposed to, passing, shooting and scoring. The intensity of the game picked up and our luck with holding Vanguard scoreless was gone when there left forward shot the ball right over my foot and then into the right corner passed our goalkeeper. The score now was tied 1-1 and I could start to see the change in momentum as the Vanguard players cheered and we started arguing with each other. It reminded me of the exact situation earlier in the first half when we scored. We woke up and played back with the same determination that we had in the first half, and I was finally moving the ball down the field for our offense to score, but we were unable to get a goal into the back of the net. With only 15 minutes left in the game, I knew it was crunch time, live or die, score or go home type of situation. My jersey felt like it weighed twenty pounds with all the sweat bearing down on it. Vanguard continued to press their big, fast and strong guys up the field putting pressure on our defense, and when they scored that second goal, our whole team spirit just seemed to die. Vanguard`s talent had finally broken through just like in the earlier games against us. Now we were the ones losing and it was our turn to score. Yet we had trailed through most of our games anyway, so this was familiar situation. Vanguard continued to improve on their play in the second half and shut down our offense as we tried to score. Our coach took our one of our midfielders and put an extra forward in to try and help score but that left our dense