Finding Home Through Soccer’s Glory and Pain

How can one field mean so much?

By Megan Turchi

This field has given me equal parts glory and pain. This field at Wellesley College was the first place that I knew when I moved 3,000 miles away as an 18-year-old from the bubble of Orange County, Calif. to place soccer and go to school. I got to Wellesley few weeks early, because that’s what fall athletes do.

This field was a place where I grew and matured. It was also the place where I fell. Hard.

I had trained all summer, running and lifting and it had been a long road to this field. From a five-year-old who threated to quit after my first game to an NCAA college athelete. It was both a fact and unfathomable that I was here.

I remember my new coach telling me that Wellesley had one of the best fields in New England — and well, he was right. After my first sweaty, bug-filled, 90 degree practice in the middle of August 2009, I sat down and took off my cleats. Blisters had already began to form and despite all the training my legs felt dead, but the second I stood up the feeling of that grass — spongy and wet — as it touched my feet made me realize I was home.

I thrived in this place from the beginning. I scored three game winning overtime goals on that field — each time the ball would hit the back of the net, the ref would blow the whistle and my 20 teammates and best friends would crowd around me, jumping up and down as if I was a local hero and I felt like one.

Fast forward a year and my feet touched the same field and something did not field right. I had a pain in my hip that I had never felt before. But, I always listened to the cliche to play through the pain and I wasn’t going to change that now. So, I played and played. Playing on this field was no longer honor, but filled with excruciating pain. I hid the tears not so subtly every time I stepped on this field. I tried to ignore it and feel the same way I did the year before, but I didn’t and after the last whistle of the season blew, I felt some relief.

The same field a year later felt like a foreign place. Every shot, every turn, every step brought a deep burning pain thats origin could not be pinpointed. I lived the cliche and played through the pain. I found out at the end of the season that I had torn my labrum.

Basically, the cartilage between my left femur and my hip bone separated from the bone. Ah, yes, that would explain the pain.

I had surgery to fix it and came back too quickly, but I was not going to miss a game — not on this field, not in my home.

Next season, I torn my right labrum. Same injury, same season filled with heartbreak and tears. A deja vu of the last year.

Senior year came around and I now was playing on two hips that had been surgically repaired and what did I do? Tear them BOTH again, I could just tell — it felt the same way.

I finished my senior year with quite a few goals, reliving the glory days of my first year beginners luck.

I had two more surgeries to fix them again and I am still in recovery. This field caused me pain.

When I go back to it now, I struggle to remember the games I cried or the games I mentally broke down because of this pain.

I remember the goals, the friends — the small period of time my body felt like a college student’s body should.

The smells, the sounds of the net clinking against the goalpost, the American flag waving in the breeze reminds me of the 5-year-old who hated soccer, but stuck with it to realize it was a passion.

I will never step on that grass and not remember the feeling of that first summer. Despite the surgeries and despite the fact I may never be able to play the game I love again, I don’t regret it, because I found this place.