The importance of playing against people better than you in sports

When I was a young teenager I was extremely good at soccer / football. I was also very good at American football but later on my body size was not keeping up with what is necessary to see myself having a future in that so I focused almost entirely on soccer. I ended up getting a college scholarship because of my abilities and there were a lot of people that thought I could have gone pro. I didn't because my desire diminished once I was in college and all of a sudden found out I like partying and girls a lot more than I liked soccer. That's another story though.

When I was young I rarely encountered situations where I was playing soccer against anyone that could even come close to my level of ability. This is because I was in the recreational leagues where just anyone who signed up was put on a team. This would mean that the teams would be interspersed with people that were really good like me, people of average ability that didn't take it seriously, and people who were absolutely terrible at it and would even cry during games because they really didn't want to be there but their parents wanted them to get their fat asses out of the house for a bit.

I DOMINATED during the ages of say 11-13 and it was my parents that had the wherewithal to realize that I was not going to get any better unless I were to play with and against people of significantly higher ability than I was at that time engaged with.

src

If you are terrible at a sport, finding people who are better than you shouldn't be too difficult. At the risk of sounding like I am tooting my own horn here I will go ahead and say that it was pretty tough for us to find players that were even on my level of ability when I was a teenager. My parents had to search pretty far and go through a lot to find a private league team where you had to pay in order to be part of it. If you just had money, that wasn't enough. There were tryouts and if you couldn't prove your mettle in those few days you were out no matter how much money your family had - well that probably isn't true, I'm sure that a billionaire son would have been let on the team even if he didn't have legs.

Anyway, I suddenly found myself in a situation that I had never encountered at a time in my life that I could remember. Most of the people on the field during these practices were my equals in terms of ability, and many of them were actually better than me. This ultimately resulted in me rising to the top once again because my parents saw something in me and pledged a great deal of time and money into nurturing my growth as a player.

When I was practicing with this group of boys I had to hone my skills even more. In fact I had to develop skills that I didn't even know that I had in me because now we had a "real"coach who was being paid to be there. This was the first time I had ever had a coach that was European and it was also the first time that a coach of mine wasn't one of the players' father.

I was, for the first time in years, put in situations where failure was very likely. I also learned the teamwork side of things and how important that is in the game. Previously, when I was a dominant player on a team, passing the ball to a teammate was something I was hesitant to do because I felt (and was correct) that I was far less likely to lose the ball that my lessor-skilled teammates were, even if I never passed the ball. Using this tactic in the lower leagues resulted in me, more often than not, scoring a hat-trick every single game. In the new, highly-talented team, I was NEVER going to score a goal unless I utilized my teammates.

src

In these advanced leagues, everyone was VERY good. You really had to have a strategy and stay on your toes in order to succeed in this league and others like it all across the USA. Other than academies that didn't exist at the time because there was no MLS, this was the ONLY place you could get competition and training of this sort.

I think back on those times and how my life would have been substantially different if my parents had just continued to allow me to be the "Messi of the B-league." Sure, I would have been the MVP every single year until I graduated, but compared to the kids playing on these private leagues I would be overshadowed because I hadn't yet learned the team aspect of the game that is so essential to any team's success. There was no reason for me to learn it... most of my teammates were useless and this eventually lead to me learning how to bend corner kicks so I didn't have to rely on my teammates for goals. I scored half a dozen of these by the way and not a single teammate of mine touched the ball and the defense was clueless on how to prevent it.

When I first arrived at this private league, I was arrogant because I had never been challenged. This arrogance quickly turned to surprise, then fear, then later frustration and eventually triumph because I had to push myself to get better.

Even if you are going to get thrashed initially, I believe that the only way youth can truly excel at a sport, any sport, is to not be content to be the best in a tiny subsect. You have to be willing to knowingly take on people that are better than you. It is with this and only this that I believe a person can achieve their true potential.

I have my parents to thank a lot for this. Had it not been for their wisdom I probably would have been content to just be king of a very small castle until eventually not playing anymore. Because of them I got to go to college for free and got a bunch of accolades because of it. I had no notion of going pro and it is my own damn fault that I didn't excel on my college team. That's a lapse in my commitment which I deeply regret that I will have to get into at a later date.