UNITED STATES
Kelly.con
July 9, 2018
By Kelly Conheeney
How did you get to be a professional athlete? It’s a question I am asked often. By parents, coaches, fans, etc. It’s a common question for any professional athlete… “Tell me how you got here….”
My mind shoots to my 10-year-old self kicking a ball against a wall over and over and over again. I was the little girl who slept with a soccer ball next to her pillow at night, under her Mia Hamm poster and US Women’s National Team Calendar hanging on the wall, praying to whatever god was out there, to give me the ability to one day play like these women. It probably went something like, “Hey God, it’s me Kelly. PLEASE let me be Mia Hamm one day.” Just praying to someone I was told would make all my dreams come true. Soccer was life. It’s still life. and sometimes I wonder how I got through it all to get to where I am today. Everyone has a “how they got there” story.
It was my first love and my life’s work from an early age. It’s a beautiful yet unforgiving love; I learned the hard way that playing the game won’t last forever. I endured a head injury in college that put a hold on my career for 3 and a half years and during that time I kept asking myself, “who am I without a ball at my feet?” For a while I didn’t know who that person was. Those days were some of the hardest of my life. I felt like a prisoner in my own body, unable to do the things I once did so freely. Contained to a dark room and isolated from the world around me. It felt like a part of me died in some ways. I had a hard time coping with the loss of something that meant everything to me and at the time defined who I was. Losing the game forced me to take a step back and look in the mirror. It forced me to face a part of me that was buried deep in the darkest pit of my soul. The part where my heart starts racing and my palms start sweating when someone asks me the “How’d you get there?” question.
All I can think of is my youth coach who taught me how to play the game. His name was Keith. He started coaching me when I was 10. “Recruited” me to come play for his team after watching me play every position on the field during a game where his team beat mine 5-0. I guess he saw something in me. Versatility? Nah, a little Tasmanian devil that never stopped working. He was Brazilian and every practice was about getting maximum touches on the ball. I absolutely loved training with him, learning new things and making him proud. You know how you are when you’re 10; When you do something good and your coach praises you, you thrive off of it. I would do anything to make him proud of me. He worked with me everyday and made me feel like I’d be the best to play the game if I stuck around him. He worked his way into my family as the years went on.
At an incredibly influential age, a time when curiosity and a hunger to learn drive you towards a passion, you trust that everyone wants the best for you. You trust the people around you to protect you and help you achieve your dreams. Especially the person who is giving you the tools to succeed. You just trust people at that age, you don’t put up walls. Well, some 10 year olds know what walls are… I didn’t. I don’t remember the specific moment Keith started abusing the power he had. But when I look back on it now, I realize he had been grooming me from the very beginning. He worked with me individually on skills, until I’d master them, and then he would take me to his camps to be the demo girl to show others how to do it. He brought me to play with the older girls he trained, and took me to practice with boys to show them there was a girl out there better than them. And I was, I was fucking good. I was also good at being his puppet. His praise fueled me. Soccer quickly became the single most important thing in my world. It was like nothing else mattered.
By age 13 he had gained control of most areas of my life. Sometimes I thought, maybe it was my fault, because I always did what he said. But thats how it was in America growing up. You do what coach says, so from the outside there wasn’t anything unusual about the way he was treating me. Before I knew it I was getting stripped of all the things I called my own until I didn’t recognize who I was anymore.
I remember when I would have a bad game and he would tell me I played like shit. Instead of giving constructive feedback as a good coach would have done, he put me down. I always took what he said to heart, because his opinion really mattered to me. It taught me to believe that a good or bad game decided my worth as a human being. He was the one who got to decide my worth.
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