Mia Hamm Winners Never Quit-Biography

As most of you all know Mia Hamm is one of the worlds best soccer players we have ever seen.  In 1979 Mia Hamm who was eight was in the beginning of her UN known soccer career while living in Texas.  Mia Hamm was the youngest woman to ever play with the United States National Team at the age 15.  She won her first world cup at the young age of 19 and then in 1996 she won a gold medal in the Olympic games in Atlanta, where over 80,000 fans came to support her. In college Mia Hamm attended UNC where she lead her team to four NCAA championships.  Mia Hamm is known for many accomplishments, she scored the final goal against China in the world cup in 1999, which was rated the highest rated woman sports event on TV history in the United States.  One of her biggest accomplishments is that at the age of 27 Mia became the world’s leading goal scorer in international competition for males and females!  As one can see Mia Hamm is not only a famous athlete but also a leader for many people around the world.  Mia grew up learning how important it is to be part of a team, she always said that there was no me in “Mia”, and this lesson has helped lead her to be who she is today.  Winners Never Quit, which is written by Mia, is such a great book for students to read.  Based off the true story of Mia and her life lessons, it is about a young girl who struggles with quitting when things don’t go her way.  The young girl in the story (Mia) loves to play soccer, but she hates to loose, which causes many problems when she is playing pick up games with her brother and sister and other friends of theirs.  During the games Mia has a hard time getting the ball past her sister so she decides to storm off the field and quit the game.  The next day when she is ready to play again her brother tells her that they don’t want quitters playing with them and that she will have to sit the game out.  Mia gets very upset over this and realizes that the loves soccer more than she hates loosing, so she decides to give it another shot and soon realizes that winners never quit!  This is such a great book because it tells the story about a young girl who is about to give up on her dream of playing soccer because she isn’t getting the results that she wants.  This is so important because if Mia had never learned about this lesson she wouldn’t have accomplished everything she has today.  I also really enjoyed this book because at the end it had pictures and many important facts about Mia and things she has won like I mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph.   This is definantly a book I would use in my classroom because I think so many children struggle with quitting and things not always turning out the way they want them to.  It is important they also learn that winners never quit because things aren’t always going to go their way.  I would read this to my students and as a class have them reflect on what it means to them.  I think it would be interesting to have the class sit in a circle and talk about different experiences they have had where they almost or did quit and how it affected them or what they did in the situation.