Soccer has been, is, and forever will be my favorite sport. I’ve played since I was just a little guy running around in a beehive of kids chasing a small ball trying to put it into a net. Even though I don’t play competitively anymore, some of my favorite memories are soccer related. The relationships I forged through playing the sport will remain with me for the rest of my life. Here are some of the most important lessons soccer has taught me.

Practice never ends.

Practices were always the most dreaded part of the sport, as they are with most other sports. Grueling and physically demanding, suicides were almost always a part of the end of practice. But when you went home after practice, the coach always expected you to be putting in hours of work off the pitch. Practice never ended, and if you wanted to see improvements, you had to put in work on your own. If you want to get better at a job, or get better grades at school, the work you put in goes beyond what is done solely in the workplace or in the classroom.

Individual skills are important, but teamwork leads to victory.

When you practice, you develop your individual skills. But when you get back to a team practice or in a game, you have to be able to adapt those skills to help the team. More often than not, games are decided based on how well the team performs, not how well individuals perform. When you work in group settings, you have to learn how to adapt everyone’s individual skills to help the performance of the team and get the result you want.

Being outspoken is sometimes required.

Being an introvert, playing defender was a step outside of my comfort zone. I had to talk to my teammates, a lot, and sometimes that required me using a loud voice that hardly ever escaped my body. But I learned that communication is key, and that letting people know where they can pass or when they can make a run is applicable in many life settings. You are showing them a path but letting them take it because in the end, it will help them get a result they want.

Play to the whistle.

Many times I have been a victim of not playing until the whistle blows. The ball will seem like it is out of bounds but the other team continues to play and we end up being scored on. The ball is not out of bounds until a flag is raised and a whistle is blown. You play as hard as you can until that whistle blows and then you know you can take a breather. A job is not done until the whistle is blown, or you know that you have done everything you can until you have finally crossed that line of, “I can’t work on this anymore because I’ve worked on it so much, and I don’t know what else I can do.”

Losing is sometimes better than winning.

If you beat a team 7-0 and the only way you can score is by a cross that is headed in (because that’s what coach says), this doesn’t help your team. Yeah, you work on headers but then that becomes the main focuses and other aspects of your game slip and falter. If you lose 2-1 in a close game, you can pinpoint certain aspects of your team and game that need improvement and work those out in practice so they do not become vulnerabilities in game settings. Find a weakness in your study or work habits and set that as a goal to work on and you will see improvements.

Love and passion.

You can’t continue to play a sport if you don’t have a passion to be there. I grew to love this beautiful game because it became my life and my passion. My teammates drove me to be better because of their unceasing passion for the game, which rubbed off on me. I will always love this sport because of the person it has shaped me to be, and for that I am forever grateful.