Neha's Blog

The temperature outside was scorching and the playing conditions were humid though it was still early morning. This was a typical occurrence to the beginning of warm-ups. Joining a game like football was one of the greatest thing I ever did. Playing football taught me several lessons and instilled numerous values into me even though I played it for just a few days.

On the first day of training itself I got up late and rushed fastly towards the venue where I was going  to be trained. My coach was a very patient and calm person.  We started with warm up to avoid any injuries. It consisted of  several general exercises. At the first stage he let me take the feel of football and told me to play alone.  However, after some time during the simple game, I noticed that I didn't run as hard as I could.

The fact of the matter is that I really did not want to be passed the ball. I didn't want to be the one at fault if I couldn’t control it and the play didn't succeed because I was too afraid of making a mistake. That aspect of my character led the first years of my high school life. I refrained from asking questions in class, afraid they  might be considered too stupid or dumb by my classmates. But my coach seemed impressed by my style of hitting the ball on first day itself, it was a pleasing surprise . After learning several tactics and discussion of  strategies for passing  the ball, we took  a gentle walk around the ground and called it a day.

On the second day, as always I was late for few minutes and my coach gave me a cute  smile.  Not wasting a single minute, we started with a round of running and completed the warm-up session with exercises. Then we started with short passes. And I realized, I was doing well and felt satisfied about it. Then that day, coach taught me other  techniques about how to pass the ball as well as how to stop it. I felt stopping the ball was much more interesting than passing it. I spend some time on both the techniques and played several turns with coach, then i asked him for the short break. After  resuming  to training again, we played a simple game of passing the ball parallely and stopping it simultaneously .Then we had a session of sprints and that was the end of the session. After that I went home physically and mentally exhausted.

A few days passed with some training tactics and tricks, of course with the practice and real time applications in simple games. Yet my apprehension prevailed as I continued to fear about, “what if another player got injured?”. I was still afraid of making mistakes and getting blamed by coach. During my four wheeler training, this  fear led me to avoid the classes. Most of the time the mistakes were not significant; they rarely changed the outcome of driving. Yet I received a thorough verbal lashing from my instructor for the mistakes I made. These occurrences only compounded my fear of driving. However, I did not always make mistakes. Sometimes I drove carefully and  without a   single mistake and instruction, for which I was praised by instructor. And now, when I look back, it feels like I am a changed person today.