I think in the bullpen you can tell during your warmups, if you have a good feel for it. But anything can happen once you get into a game. Sometimes you just wind up throwing it better than ever before one day without knowing why.
The Christmas season reminds us that a demonstration of religion is always much better than a definition of it...especially in front of the kids.
Perhaps the best Yuletide decorations are to be wreathed in smiles and wrapped in hugs.
The miracle of Christmas is that a baby can be so decisive.
It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty founder was a child himself.
The players start to recognise your game, start to know how you move, how you pass, how you shoot and the things become difficult now. So now I need to improve more and to work more and understand more the teams who I play against because they will understand me better, but I need to be prepared to understand better the difficulties they can have.
I want the Saints to be one of those teams where when other teams see us on the schedule, they know they're in for one hell of a game.
Sometimes the hardest part of the stage is right at the beginning. The other teams will leave it to us to chase down a breakaway, and we can't allow a big group to go up the road - anything more than four riders is trouble.
I'm always going to be around the game of basketball. I plan to keep my options open as a player moving forward, but that's not coaching. Maybe front office work, working with teams and spreading the game, maybe teaching the game to young people, that's something that's a very big passion.
I have multiple friends on other teams who after a game, they'll tell me the game plan... part of the game plan is to stop you. It's a respect factor.
Sometimes, you can be your own thing that hurts you. It's you. It's like knowing too much of the game when really all you need to do is play the thing that's really happening in front of you.
There's no better feeling than coming off the pitch knowing you've won the game.
Hopefully it grows, hopefully we get more teams, and more people buy into us and realize how important it is for the women's game - and that our NWSL gets better and better so we can get better for our national team.
Sometimes expanding your game isn't better. Sometimes shrinking your game is a little bit better and really get to the things you do well.
It's not so easy for us when we play teams who have a different mindset, like Chelsea or Inter Milan, because they have the intention of trying to stop us rather than playing a game that is more attractive for the spectators to enjoy.
It's not hard for me to stay humble. I think there is always somebody better than me, so that's what keeps me humble. A lot of people could learn how to stay humble.
We play sometimes against teams with more individual quality than us, better players, bigger budgets, whatever, but we try to play our football. We don't try to change too much in our philosophy, in our model.
If you try to stop all these teams and players celebrating with the fans, some of them taking their shirts off, it is part of the game and something you cannot stop. It is something important, even if sometimes you get fined.
I was an empty shell. Like a vacant house?condemned?for months I'd been utterly uninhabitable. Now I was a little improved. The front room was in better repair. But that was all?just the one small piece. He deserved better than that?better than a one-room, falling-down fixer-upper. No amount of investment on his part could put me back in working order.