Coach Alex Gonzalez was a staff member at AJMS for a while and decided he wanted to become a coach at AJMS due to the girls having a volleyball team and wanting the boys to have a sport as well.

“I wanted to actually provide the students with a team where they can reflect themselves and release a lot of their energy on the field because to me soccer has always been a self-care activity where it helps forget the whole world outside and be ourselves on the field.”

Alex had many challenges throughout the process of becoming coach like getting approvals to become a coach, programming many practices and games and, hardest of all, choosing the players. The reason he had a very hard time choosing the players was because when he was younger he would also try out for soccer teams and he would get rejected so he didn’t want students to have the same feelings he had to go through when he didn’t get into the team.

“Big challenges I had to go through: obviously not being a teacher and finding other teachers that were passionate about the sport and could provide for the students. Without Ms. Thomas and Ms. Nikky this wouldn’t have been possible.”

Coach Alex clearly has love for the sport. He wants students to try to show their talent and mainly have fun. Although he also wants to help with students’ grades and school in general so that they won’t make some of the same mistakes he says he did when he was still a students.

He also tries to get students to understand that soccer is like real life.  They need to want to earn their spot on the team and fight for what they want so that they can get on the team or other things in the future.

“It made it much easier for us to create this passion for ourselves and not just that but show we can do something better and that’s the reason I picture soccer because soccer expresses ourselves in different manners whether it is inside and outside the field,” said Alex.