Quotes About Youth

For me at 16 and 17 years old, I wasn't even playing for the academy teams. I hardly played in the starting XI for the Under 19s.

I was heavily into sport from 10 to 15, I was in all the teams, and it was everything to me. But I was very young for my school year and when puberty kicked in for my classmates I got left behind.

I was a breakdancer as a kid. I was on one of the top break dancing teams in Australia.

My dad was the one who really loved basketball, and he was the one that put the basketball in my hands, and my mom was 'Team Mom' of all my teams. I used to play for three or four teams at once and she would just spend her entire afternoon driving me from practice to practice to practice.

For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams.

When I started playing, there were no teams and no structure, so I had to play with the boys. I get very emotional when I think about the humiliation that I've suffered playing football.

At 17, I went to Stanford University to study engineering. My time was occupied with the required reading and the extracurricular duties of managing the baseball and football teams and earning my way.

I played soccer when I was a kid. I started when I was 8 and played for 8 more years. I was pretty good. I used to train with Atletico Nacional, which is one of the most important teams in Colombia. I used to train every day.

There are a lot of young teams that all they are is young. That doesn't mean they have a chance to be good.

I want to inspire kids, and yeah, if that helps with expansion teams - in the MLS or anything like that - but my main goal is just to inspire. Try and inspire our youth.

It's funny: one of the strongest parts of my game today is heading, and that only really developed when I started playing at the professional level. In the youth teams, all we did was passing.

I will say it loud and clear: at Manchester City, it is all about what you choose to look at. If you look at the money spent on players, you will only ever see that side of City. If you look at the bigger plan, which is investment in the community, facilities, and youth teams, you realise there is heart and soul in this club.

Teams want the best players. If the best players come through your academy, you can play.

I think for every young player of my age, they have to go out on loan. I know there's an U21 league and the Europa League for the youth teams, but it's not the same as playing men's football, when there's a lot more riding on it.

As young Australians, the value of teamwork has been instilled in us throughout our schooling.

Back when I was a kid, I used to tear pages out of magazines and stick them on my bedroom wall - I had the Eternity ads on my wall and the CK One ads. My whole childhood, those were on my wall, and cut to 20 years later, being asked to be the face of one of Calvin Klein's new fragrances is kind of surreal.

Kids are all computer-savvy. Sit down and write to your parents on the computer. And just say, I have some questions and I'm scared. There's some stuff I don't know and I really need to talk to you about sex. Tear it off and put it on their pillow. They'll read it.

The moment our youth succeed, we try to figure out how to tear them down.

We have to train our kids better and really enforce in them that no matter what mainstream media and pop culture and all of the terrible things around us say - that it's OK to tear people down, that somehow it will make you feel better, and it's OK to gossip about people - it won't make you feel better.

Every day I wake up, and I think about the wear and tear on my body, and will I be able to continue to perform at a high level. Sometimes I'm working with guys that are 15 years younger than me, 20 years younger than me.

You couldn't pay me enough money to go back to being 20. So many tears; what a nightmare it was. It's much better being older.

I ran out of tears when I was 14.

At things like DragWorld and Drag Con, you see young people come out in droves and be moved to tears, or hear their stories about how they found strength in what we do.

It's crazy because I did say to myself at the age of 16 that I want to be in the Premier League at 24. When I got to the Premier League at 24 with Palace, there were tears in my eyes.