When I was a child, my parents, like many others, pressured me to play a sport. I bounced between soccer, basketball, and t-ball but never really found any form of competitive outlet that interested me at the time. All I liked doing at the time was playing video games and using creative problem solving skills, but there was never anything that I could do with that besides play the games themselves.

One day, I was scrolling through the Pokemon section of Youtube and I stumbled upon the 2011 Pokemon World Championships finals between American Ray Rizzo and Italian Matteo Gini. The match was amazing and I felt like eventually, I could be there. I didn’t really do much with the game at the time because I was an 11-year-old and playing against grown men in video game competitions, much less getting my parents to take me to said competitions, just seemed incredibly far-fetched. It wasn’t until about two years later that I went to my first competition in Raleigh, North Carolina.

I was somehow able to convince my mother to take me to this small, local event about three weeks prior, giving me plenty of time to strategize and practice. I spent days reading articles that other successful players had written, I played numerous matches against friends and other random competitors on the online matchmaker, and I fine tuned my skills.

When the day finally came, I saw myself standing with 60 other players in a card shop in the middle of a strip mall. It was hot, most people hadn’t showered in weeks, and my mom was beginning to think that this was a mistake. As the first round went up, I excitedly ran to my table and began to enter combat against my opponent. Unfortunately, I lost the first round. Thankfully for me, competitive Pokemon uses a tournament format called Swiss, which means essentially that all players play a set number of rounds based on the total number of participants. I was able to win all remaining rounds after round one and placed third in the overall standings. Once the playoffs commenced, I won the quarterfinal and semifinal matches before playing against my future friend, Devon Swan, in the final. I was destroyed.

And ever since then, I’ve been hooked.

I went to more tournaments. I began to practice more and read more each day until I felt like I truly understood the competition. A month after my first tournament, I entered the Virginia regional championships in Doswell. I was joined by over 100 total competitors in my division and over 1500 competitors in total. I was nervous, I was scared, but more importantly, I was excited.

I finished the Swiss rounds with a perfect record of seven wins and zero losses, placing me as the first seed going into the playoff. I was ecstatic. I raced throughout the venue screaming of my success and I called my parents at home to let them know how my tournament was going.

I took my first win in the playoffs in the quarterfinal, but unfortunately lost in the semifinal to eventual champion Michael Spinetta-McCarthy.

Ever since then, I have made every conscious effort to play this game at the highest possible level. I traveled across the country placing high at tournaments and a year later I was able to play at the Pokemon World Championships in San Francisco. The same stage that I had dreamed of playing as a kid was now feet in front of me.

I had finally made it.

My point is, I put hard work into my craft. It was where I felt like I belonged. The level of competition that I demonstrate at these tournaments is equal, if not greater, to that of high school varsity athletes. I clock in at over 1,000 games for these tournaments, which is equivalent to roughly 5,000 minutes of play time, and this is for every time I have a tournament. No football or basketball player can commit that much time or that much dedication to their craft before each match.

This is my craft, this is my passion, this is my sport.