Personal Narrative: Osgood Schlatters

The ball goes up and over my head to land perfectly in the route of the Rocky Mount attacker. I turned and put everything I had into cutting off the strikers angle at the goal. We sprint down the length of the sidelines but he remains two steps ahead of me. He has a one on one with the goalie and he rocket it dead center at out keeper, who handles it easily enough. I have been catching strikers since freshman year but this time I wasn 't able to catch up, and it wasn 't due to the opposing player being faster than me. It was because my knees refused to allow me to push myself to full speed. I have a disease in both knees called Osgood-Schlatters, it usually develops in young teenagers who are hitting puberty at a fast rate. Most of the time Osgood will go away on its own but mine has been with me since I was in the seventh grade

My own body had failed me and I had failed the team. I 'm sure it didn 't seem like a big deal to anyone else but it was to me because I had faced this forward many a time and he had never flat out beaten me like that. It meant that if he could beat me then all the other offensive people on other teams could also beat me just as easy. After the game it was all I could think about. It haunted me to the point I didn 't hear my dads usual commentary on my game. I kept thinking about it until I came to the conclusion that if I couldn 't play as fast as I used to I would have to make up for it in some way. The next day at practice I watched some of the defenders that were typically slower than most of our offenders to see how they overcame their lack of speed. I saw that a lot of them played tighter on their respective opponents and didn 't allow them a chance to turn at all so a foot race couldn 't be started. I tried that tactic but couldn 't quite get it. I was too used to relying on my speed, and I started doubting myself more and more. My passes started going completely off target, my shots either went over or wide, and I couldn 't hold