Have you ever heard the saying, “Confidence is key”? I believe that saying is true to everyone's life. It is not important whether others support my decisions and beliefs, what truly counts is whether or not I have confidence in what I believe. Confidence really is key, and attitude is everything.

Just last year this proved true to my soccer team and I. I remember playing against Unity Christian for the first time Allendale ever has. We all thought we were going to lose...we knew we were going to lose. We didn't think we could possibly win, we had parents and coaches who believed we could beat this team, but we didn't believe in ourselves. It didn't matter that they all believe in us though, because we didn't have confidence in what we were doing. We wanted to win. We would kill to beat Unity because they had everlasting confidence in everything they did, especially soccer, because they were state champions year after year. During half time after our coach pointed out they were no more skilled than us, we gained confidence. We held off after they had scored three goals on us in the first half. When we had confidence in the second half of that game we were unstoppable, and unable to be scored on. We resulted with the score three to zero and we ended up losing that game. It wasn't because their team had better skills than us, we were about even, it was because we didn't have confidence, and the other team did. We had the wrong attitude going into the game, almost like we had already lost and with a little more confidence we could have won that game. If we would have started that game with the determination and attitude in the second half of the game, the results would have turned out better.

Confidence is key. I have the experience to prove this as I'm sure many others do. Last year my soccer team learned the hard way that attitude is everything. You have to have the right mentality before you go into a big game like that, and we didn't have it. And in the end, it wasn't important for others to believe in us, because we didn't truly believe we could do it. I believe that it is not important whether others believe in me, what truly matters is I believe in myself.