Childhood
Adu, a Ghanaian American, grew up in the port city of Tema, Ghana, where he played soccer against men three times his age. When he was eight, his mother won the Green Card Lottery, and his family moved to Rockville, Maryland, in the United States, where he attended Sequoyah Elementary School. In 2003, he became a U.S. citizen. Soon after arriving in the United States, he was discovered by a local soccer coach and began playing with boys several years older. Adu attended The Heights School, a private school in Potomac, Maryland, for several years. At the age of twelve, Adu helped the Heights School's varsity soccer team win the Maryland state championship in the fall of 2001 in a sudden death penalty shootout that saw him injured in the last two minutes of play. Adu had skipped two grades, jumping from seventh to ninth, and therefore qualifying for varsity at such a young age.
While playing with the U.S. Olympic Development Program in an under-14 tournament against the youth squads of such traditionally strong Italian teams as Lazio and Juventus, Adu's team won the competition, he led the tournament in scoring, and he was named MVP. Adu was noticed by Italian soccer clubs, including Inter Milan, who discussed a six-figure offer for him that was turned down by his mother on the advice of his agents. He was only ten years old at that time.
At the age of twelve in January 2002, Adu joined the IMG Academy, U.S. Soccer's full-time residency program in Bradenton, Florida. He made his professional debut in Major League Soccer in early 2004, at fourteen years of age.
Read more about this topic: Freddy Adu
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Although good early childhood programs can benefit all children, they are not a quick fix for all of society’s ills—from crime in the streets to adolescent pregnancy, from school failure to unemployment. We must emphasize that good quality early childhood programs can help change the social and educational outcomes for many children, but they are not a panacea; they cannot ameliorate the effects of all harmful social and psychological environments.”
—Barbara Bowman (20th century)
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)