ARAYA SLOAN
My Soccer Experience 

I started playing soccer when I was six, but it wasn’t until I was seven that I started playing soccer for a club team. In second grade a soccer coach named Eugene Pascoe came to my school, and I signed up for his program called Soccer and Friends. 

At Soccer and Friends, Coach Eugene taught me how to play real soccer, not just running around and kicking the ball. He emphasized the fundamentals of the game and that if you mastered the fundamentals you could become a great soccer player. 

After a couple of years in Soccer and Friends, I joined Coach Eugene’s futbol club called Metropolitan Futbol Club (M.F.C.). While playing for M.F.C. under Coach Eugene, Coach Walcott, and Coach Martin, I have not only learned how to play soccer but I have also learned life lessons along the way. 

They have taught me how to play with heart and putting in your best effort. They have taught me the lessons of sacrifice. That if you sacrifice your time and efforts for another person or group of people, amazing things can happen. 

One of the most important things I learned from playing at MFC is to never give up. One of Coach Walcott’s sayings was “When the times get rough, the rough gets going,” and that idea has been drilled into my mind by all three of my coaches. 

Playing with MFC is also the medium that allowed me to meet a lot of my current friends and a couple of them are probably going to end up being my lifelong friends like Sammy, Jesse, and Manny.