My alarm buzzed in the early morning. I got up out of bed and put on my away game jersey before embarking on a quiet hour’s drive to my game in Half Moon Bay. With each minute getting closer to kickoff, my excitement grew. As the game started, I slowly got into my groove, staying calm and waiting for opportunities to appear. Finally, I was able to seize the moment and score a goal to keep my team in contention for our league title.

For the past five years, many of my weekend mornings followed a similar routine involving my club soccer matches. That lasted until last year when I ultimately decided to quit the sport.

As a child growing up in Brazil, a soccer-dominated country, I surprisingly hated the sport. Up until I was 10 years old, I refused multiple attempts from my mom to get me to join my school’s soccer team and socialized mostly with people who also disliked the sport.

However, during the 2018 World Cup, my soccer-obsessed cousin from Florida came to visit us in Brazil, and after witnessing his passion for the game firsthand, I also fell in love. During the tournament, we spent hours sitting in front of the TV, watching and discussing all the games together.

After that winter, I finally enrolled in my school’s team and a club team, and I began playing and watching soccer at any opportunity I had.

Right after I fell in love with the game, I started spending hours looking at statistics from games around the world, watching my favorite players’ highlights on YouTube and watching every game I could with my dad.

During the 2019 Copa America, which was held in Brazil, I attended the opening match between Brazil and Bolivia with one of my cousins and my uncle. Later, my parents even organized a watch party for me to watch the final between Brazil and Peru with my friends.

The years of my life that followed were filled with change; I moved countries, I had to make new friends and I had to adapt to a new environment. But, through all that, one of the few consistent things in my life was my love for playing and watching soccer.

When I first arrived in the U.S., I began bonding with a lot of people over our mutual love for soccer, which made it a lot easier for me to adapt to a new environment.

Despite changing teams after moving, soccer was still an activity I could rely on to excite me and bring me happiness, regardless of where I was and with who I was. So much so that a soccer team was one of the first things I joined after moving.

On top of that, soccer was also something that allowed me to stay connected to Brazilian culture; it allowed me to stay connected to friends back home by prompting conversations about games. Almost every day, it gave me an opportunity to hear Portuguese and learn about current Brazilian cultural news through soccer social media pages.

Over the next four years, I continued developing my skills playing for Palo Alto Soccer Club, where I made a lot of friends and built one of my first communities in the U.S.

During my junior year, however, I began feeling out of touch with the game. I still enjoyed playing, but practices had become less exciting and felt more like a burden on my life.

On top of that, I began feeling huge societal pressure to quit the sport because I wasn’t going to play in college. That pressure came in part from friends in school who had begun their recruitment process and teammates who also quit soccer to focus on school.

I remember seeing people around me at school who had huge aspirations to play in college, making me feel like I was spending all this time on something that wouldn’t help me in college or getting a job. And, though this had already become clear years prior, the growing pressure to perform well in school made me feel like playing soccer was nothing but a “waste of time,” which also contributed to my feeling of disconnect with the game.

So, after discussing with my parents, in the latter half of my junior year, I decided to stop playing soccer. I didn’t enroll with my club for the upcoming season, and just like that, I quit the sport.

At first, all the free time felt amazing; I really enjoyed all the freedom and opportunities that I had. I also thought that the extra time to focus on academics helped me, but not as much as I thought it would. My afternoons were so empty that sometimes it was hard for me to focus on school, instead getting distracted by more exciting things.

However, as time passed, I began to miss the competitiveness of the sport. I still played soccer with friends and watched it as much as I could, but I really missed the community and the competitiveness that I had with club soccer.

That was until the end of my junior year when I found a solution to keep the fun of the sport, as well as my freedom. Between the struggle of AP exams and preparations for finals week, one of my friends from my old soccer team invited me to a simple “pickup match,” which I attended.

The match, which was played on a  linesless grass field rather than a regular turf soccer field, consisted of around 40 players, ranging from ages 12 and up to people in their 70s. This transformed the sport which I previously considered highly competitive into a more casual pastime, with the sole purpose of being enjoyed.

I continued attending these pickup league games twice a week for the entirety of the time I was home during the summer and the beginning of my senior year.

Participating in these games helped me realize how fulfilling it can be to do things without heavy expectations or goals.

I feel like much of the reason I wasn’t enjoying club soccer was because I felt like I wasn’t meeting the societal expectations of being at a level where I could be recruited for college.

At pickup, I didn’t have any of these expectations on me, which was freeing. I could play with intensity and passion, but I didn’t have to give the same commitment or play with the same expectations as I previously had.

Joining these pickup games reminded me that soccer, like all sports, is, at its core, simply meant to be a fun and joyful activity.

However, in today’s world, especially in the Bay Area, we put a lot of pressure on teenagers to perform in their sports and secure college recruitments without realizing that doing that can ruin the excitement and joy of sports.

Today, though, I still miss the fun that comes with competitive soccer. I’ve been able to replace that with playing the sport simply for enjoyment, without any big goals or aspirations.

Overall, this entire experience taught me the value of doing things simply for the sake of having fun instead of seeking achievements and glory.

It made me realize that not everything in life has to be done with an end goal in mind.

I believe that this perspective on life is something we lack nowadays, and I encourage more people my age to pursue doing things that simply make them happy, especially in sports.   v