To love the game – Prologue

My generation of rising athletes is the most competitive, polished and professional batch of athletes that the sporting world has seen. I say that with a certain pride, knowing that I am apart of the group. We give ourselves the label of ‘athletes’. We spend an unimaginable amount of time editing our highlights and branding ourselves as a commodity. We track our performance, our recovery, our sleep. We are becoming, by each day, more and more professional. Athletes who know how to take care of our game.

Yet with every painted layer of livery, we weigh ourselves down ever so slightly, sometimes too much that we forget why we do this in the first place. Somewhere between the training sessions, the social media edits, and the constant chase for validation, we lose touch with that pure spark that made us start. The love for the game turns into an obligation, a performance. Every mistake feels like a dent to our identity. Every rest day feels like guilt.

The truth is, somewhere along the climb, we confused growth with performance. We started thinking becoming better meant becoming flawless. That to be respected, we had to turn ourselves into something almost mechanical, something that is efficient, controlled, predictable. But the very thing that made us fall in love with the game was the opposite of that. It was wild. It was raw. It had rhythm, not routine.

We’ve turned passion into a science project.

So how do we turn it back?

How do we find that spark again?