Eventually, a month before my first semester at Montgomery College started, the soccer team began with full-force, demanding prospective players to go through a harsh two session per day, seven days a week pre-season. Under the coaching of the demanding yet respectable Pedro Braz, the team and I were embedded with the idea that we had to become discipline and fit in order to raise up to the challenge of keeping the victorious legacy that he had built since his arrival two years ago. Personally, I had never gone through such an intense period of physical work in my entire life, in some instances almost to the point of complete exhaustion. Two weeks, 24 three-hour-sessions later, and our first friendly match in pre-season arrived. I can hardly remember any moments of that game, but I can remember what I felt standing on the pitch waiting to play the game as if I had that moment tattooed on my arm; I felt euphoric at the thought of have completed a pre-season that only very few people could have …show more content…
From the start, it was very clear that their generous full-ride scholarship would come with requirements and obligations that would be enforced strictly by placing us under constant scrutiny and constant warnings of clear and inflexible consequences. Of course, I was grateful to be offered such a generous scholarship, however, from the beginning, the program left an untasteful touch into their expectations for us that hardly sparked any enthusiasm in me. Nonetheless, all the opportunities that a prestigious program like Macklin could bring were very exciting to me. As the program progressed on, competition among students in the program boiled up and at the same time the ever present supervisors in the program casted a shadow of pressure over our shoulders in every project we would work on. Despite all this, I was able to satisfactorily finish the semester with the program fulfilling all the expectations they had for us. But, in the end, for most things I only felt relieved that it was over, as opposed to feeling proud to accomplish what I did, except, when It came to community service projects. Community Service projects were different from everything else that we did in Macklin, we were able