As a high school student whose dad is her soccer coach, I don’t think it would be shocking to tell you that my goal is to play Division I soccer at an SEC school. I have had my ups and downs with the sport that I have made my main priority, but after a recent trip to Spain for soccer my perspective on the way that I live has greatly changed.
At the beginning of 2025, I was chosen to go to Spain to play soccer. The program, Inspire Sports, chose 10 girls and 10 boys all around the United States to fly out to Spain to train and play professional matches. It was an experience that I will never forget; it made me love the sport that I was pushing away, and it taught me how to live in the present.
Almost every day we would have a training session in the morning with coaches who worked for the professional teams of Real Madrid and Valencia. Even when I was picking up equipment, taking a sip of water or dozing off when our coaches were talking since they spoke little English, I kept thinking my life wasn’t real.
I couldn’t accept the fact that I was in Spain playing soccer with my new friends that I would have for life. It felt like I was dreaming, and I was just waiting for the alarm clock to go off. However, all I could think about was what I was missing out on back home.
I was so worried about what my friends were doing at home that I wasn’t able to enjoy the experience for the first couple days.
After the first two days, I soon ventured out and began to hang out with the other girls who were chosen to go on the trip. We would spend every minute we could with each other. We would swim in the pool, play soccer-tennis on the roof, go to the market or sit in the hallway and talk about how different our lives were.
After spending a couple of hours with them, I completely forgot that I lived in Texas, because we were just a bunch of teenage girls roaming the streets of Valencia, thinking that we knew our way around the town we didn’t even know existed five days ago.
I remember lying in bed after my first day of hanging out with the girls the entire day and just smiling. I had never felt less stressed in my life because I had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t thinking about my grades, what colleges to start emailing for soccer or thinking about what my future would look like, because all I could think about was the present moment with the people around me.
The moment that touched my heart was witnessing my dad tear up at a La Liga Game we were able to go to. When we got back to our hotel I realized that I don’t live in the moment as much as I should, and that I focus too much on my future or what is happening around me that I can’t control. Seeing my dad get so emotional made me stop and realize that living in the moment allows you to take in life at a slower pace rather than focusing on too many things at once.
Ever since my trip to Spain, I have been able to enjoy life and fully live in the present moment. Whether that has been at a football game, at soccer practice or having a sleepover with my friends, I have caught myself not thinking about what was happening next.
