The short version
At sixteen I was the starting keeper for the top team at one of the best clubs in my state. That was the peak. I didn’t know it yet.
In a pickup game that year, a player lost his temper and slammed into me. Fractured my back — L4 and L5. I lost a year to it, and a full season with it.
I came back. A new coach picked a different keeper over me. He was taller than me. That was the whole argument. I was faster, I jumped higher, I read the game better, and none of it mattered. Something in me quit before my body did. Senior year I didn’t even try out.
Then I left the game for ten years. I moved to LA and learned, professionally, how attention works — I built audiences and made things go viral for other people, from broke creators to big brands. That became my career.
Years later, in a new city, I started playing pickup again purely for cardio. A guy I played with told me I should try out for a semi-pro side, and he happened to know the general manager.
The GM’s verdict, word for word in spirit: good player, good game IQ, not fit enough. He put me on the second team to build my engine. I earned my way onto the first team. Then work pulled me away, the team leveled up without me, and when I came back I couldn’t keep pace. I tried playing forward with semi-pro players and got physically buried.
So here’s where I actually am: significantly better than the average player, a step below semi-pro. I’m not going to pretend otherwise — the honesty is the only way this works.
Now I’m all in, as a defender, because defending is the thinking position and thinking is my edge. My coach today is the same coach who gave me a place on his team after my back healed, fifteen years ago. And yes — I know exactly how attention works, I built it for other people for a decade, and I’m aiming that entire machine at one target: a USL League Two roster spot. You get to watch whether it works.