Moving

            For the first 12 years of my life everything was as close to perfect as humanly possible. I was having the time of my life playing sports and hanging out with friends with very little to worry about. However, during the summer of my twelfth birthday my life changed forever when I was told that, come November, my family and I were going to be moving to Virginia Beach. At first this change might not seem as a bad thing, the term beach speaks for itself, but being a 12 year old from South Jersey I was afraid of what the south held in store for me. I left my sports teams, best friends, and everything else I had ever known behind, and moved to a place that I had only known of through soccer tournaments. Although it seemed as though this experience was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, I can now say that my feelings towards the move have radically changed in the past five plus years. The people I have met here and the experiences I've had have sculpted me as an individual. Without the move from South Jersey to Virginia Beach, I would not be the individual who is writing this essay now.
             When I was told about the news of moving in late July of 1998, I was skeptical and really did not know how to react to the news. I shrugged off the idea of moving, and went about with my daily life not wasting any of my remaining time in my home town. As the months quickly passed by and moving day approached at an ever so rapid pace, I began to really grasp how much I would miss the town I had lived in for so long. The move took place at the closing point of my travel soccer season, and the second half of my first semester in seventh grade. Saying goodbye to my friends wasn't nearly as hard as it was to say goodbye to my soccer team and my best friend, Kyle Summers. My dad had built my travel team from the ground up, holding our first try outs when we were 9 years old to structuring one of the elite teams in all of New Jersey by the time we were 12.