1 in your life-not your boyfriend or your social life or anything else. You need to play box-to-box, defend and do the dirty work. You can’t just sit behind the strikers, feed them through balls and be a one-way player. You need to be the hardest-working person out there every time. You need to start treating every training session, every game, as if it were a World Cup final. “If you keep working at 80%, you won’t get anywhere. It’s almost as if I’ve been waiting for someone like this my whole life. This coach, a man who barely knows me, has just shredded me, and somehow I am fine with it. You always have a reason things are not working out, instead of focusing on what you can do to make them work out.” You make excuses and find people to blame. You aren’t the sort of player who is going to thrive under pressure. You don’t push yourself hard and you are lazy. Then he provides the most detailed evaluation of me I’ve ever gotten. But if you put in that work, then I don’t see any reason why you can’t go as far as you want.” “O.K., Carli, this is the story as I see it,” he says. As I rest, James asks more questions.įinally, after I knock out as many sit-ups and pushups as possible in two minutes, he asks me to sit down on the red bleachers. I go hard and do my best but, honestly, it’s not very good and I know it. After that I do interval work-400 meters, 200 meters, 100 meters. James wants me to do the Cooper Fitness Test, running at a steady pace as far as I can go over 12 minutes. On Saturday afternoon I report to the track at Lenape High in Medford, N.J. There’s something I like straight away about James. James says he wants to meet again on Saturday to do a fitness evaluation. About 20 minutes into a one-hour session, I am gassed. I don’t mind the questions, because it gives me time to rest. The amount of ownership I take is negligible.
#Spat on cleats full
“Why do you think you were cut? What sort of teammate are you? Do you connect with people and support others? Do you like to go on the attack? What are your strengths? Do you get back on defense?Īlmost every answer I give is full of excuses or finger-pointing. I demonstrate my first touch, passing, volleying, my technique on the ball with every part of both feet. I think this is a colossal waste of time.
“Let’s start with some skill work and see where you are,” he says. We settle on a date, a Thursday night in December, and I pull up to a deserted, dimly lit pitch in Lumberton, N.J. He suggests I come down to his field so he can have a look at me.
Finally, I dial this James Galanis’s number. I am as adrift as a piece of flotsam in the Atlantic.Īnd that’s when my father, Steve, my first coach and my biggest supporter in the early years of my career, suggests I reach out to a highly regarded trainer in our area, an Australian named James Galanis. I always thought it would be cool to be an FBI agent. My dream is to play for the U.S., and if I can’t even make the JV, what’s the point? So I am seriously considering finishing up my time with my team at Rutgers, getting my degree and calling it a career. U-21 team by a coach who told me straight out that I wasn’t national team material. I am 21 and I have just been cut from the U.S. If I’m not happy you can see it on my face from the other end of the Jersey Turnpike, and at the moment I am not happy. How is mascara or eyeliner going to help me win? I don’t put on makeup when I’m getting ready for a game, because why would I? I am gearing up for battle. I don’t much care about the red carpet or being on the covers of magazines. I’m not one to put on airs or change my demeanor depending on where I am or who I am talking to. That’s the first thing you should know about me. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The following is excerpted from WHEN NOBODY WAS WATCHING: My Hard-Fought Journey to the Top of the Soccer World by Carli Lloyd with Wayne Coffey.
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