Tiger Talk: Rediscovering a Love for Soccer

Tiger Talk: Rediscovering a Love for Soccer

Welcome to #TIGERTALK – a SweetwaterNOW exclusive series where Rock Springs High School Tigers inspire our community by telling their stories in their own words.


I have been playing soccer for half of my life, and as a little girl I dreamed of going big places with soccer. Until things changed my sophomore year, the year of COVID as everyone else remembers.

To me that year meant so much more than just a canceled season. It was a year that impacted the love of the sport that I had built my whole life around.

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I first played soccer when I was three years old. We moved to a different town and I only played a year there before not playing again until we came back to Rock Springs, playing again in fifth grade.


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I remember sitting on the stairs of the house with my dad and little sister being told we found a traveling club to play in and I was so excited to get the chance to better improve my skills. I remember my first try out. I was crying because I thought I wouldn’t make a team and the coach, Dustin Moses, came up to me and told me that I was good enough and had such great potential and that everything would be okay. That’s when I really developed the love and passion that brought me to signing for college.

I made the silver team my fifth, sixth and seventh grade year. All of those years I spent countless hours working for that gold spot and I was finally rewarded with one right before high school. We then took state and it was my first state title for soccer. That day will always be a day I remember the hard work paying off.

My dad, Josh Webb, and Dustin Moses were my coaches at the time and they helped to push me to play for all of the state teams that I could. Even throughout high school I was still asking them for offseason help. They made some of the biggest impacts on my life and I couldn’t thank them enough for pushing me through everything to get me to gain my confidence to sign at Waldorf University.

My high school years of soccer were the hardest years of soccer I think I have ever had to play through. My freshman year was just a lot of grit, and I kept my head down and pushed through my entire year until I got my varsity letter. My sophomore year is really when things began to go
downhill from there.

I remember going through tryouts and being told that our year may be cut short because of the COVID-19 outbreak. I remember enjoying most of my extra long break until April 9, 2020. My entire soccer team got on a call and we weren’t told why, we just knew we had to be on a call. That phone call was the day I couldn’t find the same drive for soccer until the end of my senior year. I remember sitting in my mom’s room when I had returned from a fishing trip with my dad and our head coach said one sentence that wrecked our world.

“Coach Fisher is no longer with us.”

I immediately broke down into tears, sobbing in my mother’s arms.

You never realize the impact someone has on you until they truly are gone. You don’t realize that just by knowing the person for only a year and spending almost everyday together that they truly do become your family. He had impacted us in so many ways and his life was cut short.

That’s when I stopped working outside of practice and didn’t see the point of continuing soccer without my coach. I remembered all the times he would tell me to keep pushing and keep my head up when no one else would. From that moment on, soccer was just something to get me out of the house. It wasn’t fun, it didn’t make me happy. I would come home almost every day saying I have never hated a sport more in my life. Even after being a part of the state team and having that picture of him above the bus doors, tapping it before getting off still didn’t light the fire I once had. It was to the point in my senior year that I shared such a hatred for the sport that I was going to turn in my gear.

It wasn’t until I had talked to my mom, dad, and former coaches and players that I decided to keep working. I remember the one thing my mom told me that rekindled the love for the game again.

“Your little sister looks up to you. I know me and your dad do too.”

She called me her hero and so did my dad. They told me that they looked up to me because of how much grit and hard work I had. I never gave up, even though I was so tempted. I never threw in the towel. Knowing that they looked up to me, I asked for help reaching out to colleges, and my mom must have known the fire was back because she had already talked to my former teammate Zoe Silovich about playing in college and she suggested Waldorf University. My mom sent my film out to four colleges and overnight we had heard back from two.

It may not sound like a lot, but to a girl who lost all confidence in her ability to play and thought she would never be good enough, it meant everything.

I was so excited to hear back from Waldorf specifically and when they gave me an offer I knew that I wouldn’t turn it down, and that it all wasn’t for nothing. I knew that before I lost the love of soccer, that little girl would have been so proud that I was living out my dreams. I had achieved my goals and I couldn’t have been happier.

I know my coach will always be with me and all I can hear is him telling me I’ll miss 100 percent of the shots I don’t take. So as I continue to play soccer and grow my love of the sport, I continue for him, for my mom, dad, little sister, for Dustin who never doubted me for a second, and for myself, because soccer is who I am.