“Anya* is not good... But she wants it.” A pretty harsh line for a twelve-year-old to hear, but this moment helped in my development of how I deal with life’s persistent challenges. Some people see sports as an outlet, a tactic to release energy that has been bundled up for too long, a way to blow off steam after a trying day, a fun activity. For me, sports activities have always felt like a form of torture with the running and the sweating and the dreaded wall squats. My dislike for sports started long before this incident, but scoring in the opponents’ goal was the tipping point in this grand adventure.

To this day, I can still hear Coach Jun, my sixth grade field hockey coach’s voice, giving the team a pre-game pep talk in her Chinese accent. Since my teammates and I were crammed like sardines on that overheated yellow school bus, unfocused and on the brink of heat strokes, I don’t remember all that she said. “Be focused. Be aggressive out there. Stay on your marked girl.”- the usual chalk-talk. And finally, she focused on me and exhaled that line, “Anya is not good... But she wants it.” The next year, I signed up for the field hockey team again, only to score the winning goal for the other team.

Many later events in my life would follow a similar pattern. In seventh grade: basketball, the summer before eighth grade: Tang Soo Do martial arts, ninth grade: volleyball. Every time I got knocked down, I quit. But the fall of my sophomore year, things started to turn in a different direction. To fulfill my school’s physical activity requirement, I joined the tennis team, hoping that a less physically rigorous sport would be my calling. Unfortunately, it was not. After a grueling three-day preseason, I had earned a spot on the junior varsity team. For the rest of the season, I ran the sprints and always crossed the line in last place. I played in scrimmages and lost the matches about 95% of the time. Despite my failures, I remembered that traumatic-at-the-time moment in sixth grade and how much I wanted it. I figured if that scrawny eleven-year-old kid with the braces and oversized cleats could do it, I could. So, I decided to stick around and found myself quickly falling in love with the game. By the middle of the season in my junior year, the coaches had been watching me for the past two years. I still crossed the end line last and lost only 75% of my scrimmages, but they still saw how much I wanted to improve. To my luck, some of the opposing teams had extra varsity players, and my coaches chose me to play in exhibition matches. They chose me not because of my skill level, but because I had showed them all season how much I wanted to play. From that point on, I was in the game, and that was enough for me.

I don’t need the greatest grades, to win the most prizes, or to be the fastest one out on the courts. I don’t want to be the firecracker blazing down the field scoring all the goals and racking up all the points, but rather the slow burning ember with a deep-seeded passion burning inside of me. If I can want it like I did on that hockey field back in middle school, I can achieve anything.

*name has been changed