Soccer

I used to love soccer.  I loved playing it, I loved watching it.  I was never very good at it, but I still enjoyed it.  I still love watching soccer games, even on TV.  I don't enjoy playing it as much because I had a bad taste in my mouth since sophomore year of high school.

I was on the JV soccer team in my freshmen year.  JV because I wasn't good at it.  I wasn't raised on it, and I had no one to play with.  But I still loved it.  Then came sophomore year.  Freshmen year was my growth spurt, and along with it came an immense change in shoe size.  I remember telling my dad that I needed to buy new soccer shoes because the ones I had were too small.  We went to Big 5 to pick out a pair of cleats.  But after looking at the prices, my dad sat me down and told me that they were too expensive.  That he couldn't afford it, and I should just quit the team and find something else to do.

Of course I didn't listen to him.  Stealing a pair of cleats was too risky for me, so I did the next best thing: I squeezed my feet into my old cleats and kept on going.  By the end of the tryouts, I had no choice but to stop playing.  My feet hurt so much I couldn't stand on them.  I couldn't even run properly, much less aim the ball at the goal.  I got into JV again.  So I decided to quit.  I couldn't keep going on with something that was so emotionally and physically painful.

Then I found badminton.  Badminton was okay for my dad because Big 5 sold the cheapy bendable ones for $5.  But even so, there were other people on the team who had racquets to spare, so I had no problems playing.  In fact, in my junior year, my coach gave me an old racquet of his, which was still usable.  I still have to this day.

Obviously my parents kept discouraging me from continuing on.  I should stop playing badminton and focus on my studies.  (You'd think that they'd want me to keep playing because of the number of times they kept calling me fat.)  And obviously I did everything I could to keep away from the house.

I even enjoyed going to summer school or doing volunteer work just because it kept me out of the house, and therefore safe.  But now I'm slowly drifting away from this topic and moving onto a different one.