Anna Maliszewska

I know that it's tough, because it's dominated with men so far. Unfortunately, even in the U.S., you could see the struggle that the women's national team was having by getting the same amount of money that men get. In the Latin American area, which we're kind of around here in Miami, it's still this unfortunate feeling and approach with men's coaches towards the girls' coaches, and that women need to be at the house doing jobs at home, especially not playing soccer. If you want to pursue this career, you have to be strong mentally. Any negative thing you're gonna receive, just turn it into something positive. In my case, even me being an owner, I heard many negative comments about my quality, but my husband was trying to defend me. I started growing, I started getting courses, I started getting licenses, started doing seminars and sessions, and there you go. I ended up coaching at a high level. Technically, in our academy, I'm the highest licensed coach. We won a lot of tournaments with me being leader. So, that negative just turned into positive. Don't hear anything negative, just turn it into positive.

The biggest challenge is that before, we had a chance to get a contract with City of Miami for the whole year, so we were kind of relaxed, knowing that nobody's gonna come over and take over our field, that our kids are gonna have a place to grow and play. But lately, it's been every 3 months we have to renew the permit, and it's not 100% guaranteed that we're gonna have it. There's a lot of competition right now, World Cup is coming, and a lot of academies are starting to grow, and they have a lot more money than us. If you have sponsors, you can make good money on that, and they're building, they have huge sponsors from Europe, from U.S., and they can afford to pay so much more than we pay. So it's always a struggle. Sometimes we cannot even sleep at night, because we don't know if the contract is going to be extended for another 3 months. Two weeks before the expiration of the contract, it's always a headache, because we don't know what's going to happen, and then there you go, we have all those middle-class, lower-class kids, and we don't know if we're going to be able to give them the opportunity again.

Discipline is very important. In that sport, in every kind of sport, talent is great, but talent don't win championships, talents don't lead you to the top. Discipline is the most important part, because if there's no discipline, there's pretty much nothing. A good example is the kids that we put into first and second team at Inter Miami. They put extra effort. They would never say no to extra work. They would always ask how to get better. They were very loyal. There were many academies going after them saying, hey, come to us, we're gonna give you this for free, we're gonna give you that for free, which we couldn't. They were disciplined, they were loyal, and there you go, that's where they are right now. There's a lot of kids that changed the academy for bigger places, and unfortunately, their career pretty much ended. That's why discipline for me is the most important, and obviously passion. If you're passionate about something, you can do anything.