Hard Work Beats Talent When Talent Doesn't Work Hard
Amélie Pires grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario. From a young age, the first-year nursing student was always kicking a ball around. Whether she was alone, with her sisters, or with anyone that would play with her, she would be practicing. Like her sister that came before her, she quickly fell in love and climbed the ranks in minor soccer.
Playing out of Aurora, it was quite known to her that she lacked the skill her sisters did. Coaches would tell her that they would pick her because she had something that most soccer players didn’t— a mind for the game, but she lacked things most soccer players did, pure skill.
Although always tough to hear, she wanted to prove everybody wrong. The youngest of 3, she looked up to her sister, who always made all the top teams, but even through adversity, her love for soccer never faltered.
But when the COVID-19 Pandemic happened in 2020, that all changed. Amélie, who had been with somewhat the same age group and team with Aurora soccer club for most of her life. She was now watching as her teammates and the reason that she enjoyed all of the tough training and the pressure of playing an elite sport was slipping away.
Her teammates, mostly all dual sport athletes, had to choose to keep with soccer or pursue other sports. With the combination of it being easier to play other sports and the stress of the Pandemic, most of Amélie’s teammates choose to walk away from the Aurora high-performance team. That left very few girls and resulted in the team folding.
She was devastated.
Everything that she knew and loved and all her teammates were gone.
Luckily, she could still play with a team in a younger age group than she was used to and what she described as less motivated. Throughout that whole process, she lost her passion for the game. The positive environment she was so accustomed to was gone; she would come back from soccer upset and would dread going.
The love for the game was gone.
All while Amélie was losing her passion for the game, the Laurentian Coach researched out to the director of Aurora FC and asked if he had any defensive backs looking to play post-secondary soccer. He submitted Amélie’s name, along with a few others. A few weeks later, she and her parents were heading up highway 69 to Sudbury for a visit with what Amélie described: zero expectations.
Within one tryout, coach Brian Ashton offered her a place on the team for the 2022/2023 school year. Even when she accepted her Nursing offer, she was unsure if that was something she wanted. Although she loved Laurentian during the visit, there still was doubt that soccer was the sport for her. Relying on her parents’ advice to try it out for one year, then reevaluate, she moved up to Sudbury, ON, as an 18-year-old.
Although technically considered a one-year plan, Amélie is now confident that Sudbury will not only be her home for the next 3 years, but her place on the soccer team is not going anywhere. The environment that the coach created and the positive friendships formed was something Amélie didn’t anticipate and has helped her reignite the passion that burns for soccer.
With a first-year under her belt, where she started 10 of 11 games, she looks forward to continuing to play the sport she loves for the next 3 years, all while paying it forward to the incoming rookie classes and welcoming them with open arms as her veteran class did for her.
With her sister transferring from the D1 school she was previously attending to Nipissing next fall, she is specifically looking forward to the battle of North Ontario next year, where she hopes to prove all the coaches that questioned her skills many years ago wrong.