Follow the Bouncing Ball. And Your Heart.

Who doesn’t want a free tee-shirt? That’s all the kid was thinking. That the fruit was especially low-hanging - she only had to juggle a soccer ball 100 times to win one – made it a no-brainer. This was a dozen years ago, at the Super Y League North American Finals at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. The kid was down there with her club team, the New Jersey Stallions. In between games, the National Guard, the presenting sponsors of the event, had various activities going on at its tent, one of which was the juggling contest. The kid – a 4-foot, 10-inch, 92-pound midfielder – waited on line for her turn. A procession of other players, mostly boys, took the challenge. Some won shirts, some didn’t. Now it was her turn.

She was 13 years old and had been playing soccer for eight years. It was love at first kick from the day she joined a U-6 AYSO team in Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. The team was called the Hedgehogs. Their uniforms were pink. The kid wore No. 2 for coach Bridget Bentley, and her shirt would’ve gone to her knees if she hadn’t tucked it in. At an age when about half the players were inclined to look at the sky or pick daisies, she would get the ball and weave in and out of defenders as if they were cones. Her focus was 100 percent on playing and finding joy in doing it. Neither of those things has ever changed.

The kid wasn’t so good at juggling at first. She’d get to five or seven, and then the ball would glance off her foot, much to her frustration. After joining her first club team, she made friends with a girl who could juggle the ball 50 times. The kid looked at her friend as if she were Messi and Marta rolled into one.  She kept at it. It was a huge deal when she got past 10, and then 20, and then she started working with a trainer who told her that having clean touches and putting down a strong technical base would be essential if she wanted to be a good player, and juggling was a good way to hone those skills, with both feet. Soon having the ball on her foot – in the family room, her bedroom and the basement that became her private training round – was as routine as breathing. During one break in training she got a piece of pink chalk and wrote five letters on the cinder-block basement wall:

USWNT.

Back in the National Guard tent, the kid wore a thick white headband and her blue Stallions uniform with No. 33 on the back. A barrel-chested Guard member was assigned to be her counter. He said, “Go,” and the kid was off, the ball dancing from one foot to the other, just inches above her laces. This was the technique the trainer showed her, so she could master her feel for the ball in a way that people couldn’t tell whether she was left-footed or right-footed.  She blew past 25 and then 50 and was not even 90 seconds in when she hit 100.

“You’ve won a tee-shirt!” the Guard counter said, but the kid was on a roll and kept going, tap, tap, tap tap, rapid-fire juggles taking her to 200 and then 400 and then 600. By the time the Guard announced she’d hit 1,000, he asked for a colleague to take over the counting.

By now a buzz was building under the National Guard tent, and the crowd around the perimeter was two or three deep. The kid kept going. At 2,000, Counter No. 2 handed it over to Counter No. 3, who turned it over to Counter No. 4 when the juggler hit 3,000.

The kid was a good, technical player, mostly an attacking midfielder, but she was never on the big-name clubs with deep pockets, beautiful facilities and top rankings. She had friends on some of those clubs and wondered at times if she needed to be on a club that won major tournaments and fed kids into the national team pipeline, but she talked it over with her parents and a trainer she trusted and came to believe in her heart that being on the No. 1 club in Top Drawer Soccer or having a five-star ranking was not nearly as important as getting good training and getting better every single day. So that’s where she put her entire focus. It wasn’t always easy; rejection never is. One year at the Olympic Development Program (ODP)regional camp, she was in the top pool of players the whole week. On the last day, they called out the names of 20 players who would be going to Costa Rica to represent ODP in a tournament. Her name wasn’t called. The kid sobbed in her parents’ arms. When the tears finally stopped, she made a vow to herself that she was going to work harder than ever and make it impossible for them to cut her the next time. She was going to control what she could control, and not worry about anything else. She was 12 years old.

When the kid hit 5,000 and Guard counter No. 6 took charge, about 45 minutes had passed since she had gotten her 100 and won the tee-shirt. She had become a full-blown attraction by then, as word-of-mouth news spread in the nearby Players’ Village about the little kid who was tap-tap-tapping her way into the National Guard juggling record books, drawing packs of U-16 and U-17 boys to the growing circle. She passed 6,000 and then 6,500 and 7,000, and as Counter No. 7 began his shift, nobody really knew how long it would last. Then, at exactly 7,100, the kid juggled the ball up to her waist and caught it. A rousing ovation went up. One of the National Guard counters handed the kid a tee-shirt. Flocks of boys lined up to get her autograph. Somebody asked why she didn’t keep going.

“I was thirsty and my neck hurt,” the kid said.

Nobody’s soccer career is a straight line. You don’t learn to juggle for almost an hour all at once. There are injuries and frustrations and disappointments and, especially on the youth level, coaches who value winning much more than developing players, and overbearing parents who interfere, to the detriment of everybody. There are programs, from clubs to college, where the culture is toxic and the coaching is poor, and where people in charge have their own agenda. The kid learned early on you just have to power through all of it. If you keep loving the game and keep finding joy in playing it, and you keep resolving to grow and get better and be a good teammate who wants the best for everyone around you, you can overcome almost every conceivable obstacle. A dozen years after she won a tee-shirt at the Super Y League National Finals, Samantha Coffey is going to the Paris Olympics, a midfielder for the USWNT, the same initials she wrote on her basement wall, a long time ago.