The 0.1% - Justin Lee

Justin Lee is a rising senior at the King George V School in Ho Man Tin, Hong Kong. He is also a member of the KC Southern U18 club football team.

 I love football. Ever Since I can remember, I’ve loved the sport; football has been my everything. The moments of happiness and bliss just encapsulated my love for the sport. Why do I love it so much? Well, because no matter what happened, it never let me down. The more work I put in, the better I got. Yet I almost left it all behind.

 When I was 5, my family and I had a routine visit to my grandparents place. My grandad loved football just as much as I did and put on the Premier League game between Chelsea and Manchester United. I remember Paul Scholes fouling David Luiz and Juan Mata stepping up to take the freekick, and the way the ball sauntered through the air. My dad, who was an avid Chelsea fan, had already stood up to celebrate, but out of nowhere, a certain Spaniard named David De Gea pulled out an absolute worldie of a save. In that moment, I knew that I wanted to be a goalkeeper.

 I’d never been tall, and even now I’m still quite undersized for a goalkeeper. Starting my youth career at 10 in an academy, a professional goalkeeper who was coaching there at the time offered to coach me. The moment when my parents agreed changed my life forever. Starting with him, he coached me for 5 years, starting from scratch. During the sessions, there was another boy as well. He was 3 years older than me, and he was an incredible goalkeeper who always demanded more from me.

 Yet when I was 11, I felt my first sense of rejection. Despite playing incredibly well and winning the league with the 1st team of the u12s I played for the next year, I was moved from the 1st team to the 3rd team, and even then, I was told to play outfield. Why? Because of my long passing. My goalkeeper coach, who had recently started his own club, took me in. The team was called A&S Football Center, and I played there for 4 years. Starting off as the 2nd keeper in an age group above what I played, I was starved for playing time. Until one game, when the original keeper quit football, My first ever start was a horrendous pitch, and on the back of my shirt, it read 17. That game, to this day, is one of my best ever. I won man of the match after making eight saves, and the score finished 1-0.

 From that game on, I never looked back, winning Most Improved awards, and other accolades. Until 2021, 2 years after initially joining the club. I played against the club I used to play for—same coach, same players. They were at the top of the league by goal difference, and we were second. In the last minute of the game, we were down 2-1; their striker had been caught offside. I took the freekick from our own half, a perfect long ball sizzling with backspin played over their backline, and our Left Winger tucked it in, the result of 3 years of kicking a ball against a wall for an hour after every session just so that people could never say my long balls were bad again. We finished the game with a 2-2 draw, and from there, I felt that the sky was the limit.

 Yet the worst was still to come; going into the 22-23 season, I was still short, short for a goalkeeper at least. I was 5’7. With most goalkeepers being around 5’10 I was probably the shortest in the league. Around this time, I also started coaching u7s, and one of them in particular was actually quite good.

I remember the exact date clearly: November 19, 2022. If we won the game, we’d be placed in Division 1. Their team wasn't good at all. The score was 0-0. They had a free kick from the middle of the pitch. I’d caught 100 shots the same way. If you put me in the same situation 1000 times again, I’d catch them 1000 times.

 But that night, in the bleak midwinter, the ball slipped through my hands. I wasn’t tall enough. We lost 1-0, and we finished qualifying in division 3. My fault. Not my teammates, mine. Yet it wasn’t something I could fix; it was my height. Something I just couldn’t improve. I wanted the world to swallow me whole, and for a month it did. I didn’t play football for a month. Every time I kicked a ball, I saw the faces of my teammates crying because they put the hard work in; they didn't deserve to lose that game, but they did. Because of me. Because I wasn’t good enough. I’d written a text ready to send to my coaches on leaving the team because I needed to ‘focus on school, but that was an excuse for me hating myself for what happened.

But the night I was going to send the text, I got a video. It was the kid I coached smiling and thanking me for helping him develop and get better at football. His words seriously hit me: "Thank you, coach Justin, you make me love playing football," and in that instant I remembered that I love football because it’s an escape from the world I live in. I told my goalkeeper coach about nearly quitting, and he told me one of the best quotes I’d ever heard. "Football is 99.9% bad emotions, but you put in the extra work and put up with the moments where you hate everything for that 0.1% because there is no better feeling in the world."

To end that season, I was scouted and joined Kc Southern, a team playing at the highest level of football in Hong Kong, The Youth Premier League, and I hope to keep continuing and pushing forward to become a representative of my national team at the youth world cup qualifiers for 2025.

I think the moral of the story is that we love sports not because we enjoy playing them but because of the people we meet along the way and the connections we make that last long after the 90 minutes. And to you, remember that the reason you play the sport is because of the moments that make it so worth it, so If you fall down seven times, get up eight.