Tales From the Field: 12 Stories, 1 Championship

Olivia's Camp Fail (part 1)

Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.

The table sags under heaping containers of salad, pasta, and rolls at our pregame party the night before the big match against our cross-town rivals Valley High. But all it takes for me to lose my appetite is one comment from team captain Megan.

"We don't want a repeat of camp finals."

The low rumble of conversation and the smack of full mouths immediately ceases as nearly every player on the Central High women's soccer team looks at me. I lock my gaze on the fat meatball atop a pile of spaghetti covered with tomato sauce, which I'm sure matches the color of my face right now.

"What happened at camp?" asks Brooke. An innocent enough question, if you don't know what happened this summer—which she doesn't because freshmen don't attend camp—but a terribly taboo one if you know what happened.

Sadie comes to my rescue. "We lost in extra time to those stuck-up Valley girls, but it wasn't Olivia's fault."

Finding the courage to look up from my plate, I smile at Sadie. She's best friends with Addison Hunter, but we've grown a lot tighter since Hunter got hurt during preseason.

"It was my fault." I'm the first to admit that.

I set my plate down on a TV tray and take in the eyes of all the girls in Denise's living room. Most of them have looked away by now, but I meet Paloma's dark brown ones, full with curiosity. She's a sophomore, but didn't attend camp because she's new to the team after moving here from Spain.

"You don't have to talk about it," she says in a soft accent.

"No, you and Brooke should know..." Heat rises up my neck to my face, and beads of sweat form under my sports bra. "It's just embarrassing, that's all."

I take a deep breath and prepare to face not only the worst moment in my soccer career but probably my love life as well. It all started on the first day of our weeklong co-ed camp at the state college campus. As both of Central High's varsity teams piled off the school bus, I noticed Valley's bus was right in front of ours. And one of their players was staring right at me.

He had dark brown hair, shiny with gel, and a tan face. A flash of a smile exposed a chipped top tooth, and I remember running my tongue over my own straight, smooth teeth. He wore a jersey of the Italian national team, baggy soccer shorts, and blue socks with white stripes at the top pulled all the way up to his knees. A duffel bag was slung loose over one shoulder.

He looked more like a model trying to be a soccer player than an actual player. You could tell his teammates worshipped him by the way they surrounded him. Most of them had tried to copy his style but none quite pulled it off the way he did. Everything about him screamed arrogance; not my type at all.

Busy with training sessions in the morning and scrimmages in the afternoon, I didn't really think about him most of the week. But every once in a while in the cafeteria or at the water station, I'd catch him staring at me. I kept hearing his teammates yelling his name across the fields. "Marco, I'm open!" "Marco, check this out!" "Marco! Marco! Marco!"

He was Valley High's star player and leading goal scorer with an ego the size of Italy—his favorite team, of course. Absolutely not my type. Yet I was fascinated by him, and his seeming fascination of me.

None of this I told Brooke and Paloma. They just needed to know the facts. So I started the story on our last night of camp. We had the evening off in preparation for finals the next morning. The competition had been fierce over the week, but our team and Valley High's team had risen to the top in the women's bracket. We would face off with them after the men's final game, and the whole camp would gather to watch both matches.