This weekend, my youngest daughter played in her first college soccer match and it reminded me of a lesson I learned from her about teamwork and humility.

Last summer, her Dakota Alliance club soccer team won the USYS National Championship, the first team from South Dakota to ever win the highest-level title of US Youth Soccer.

But the road to that title required something new and difficult of her. It required her to begin every one of the five matches at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando on the bench.

That was different because Ava has started for every team she’s played for. At Sioux Falls Christian High School, she was a varsity starter in eighth grade. Through her years of club soccer, with so many great teammates, she had always been in the top 11.

But this was a new coach with a new strategy. At the halfway point of the first half, when teams usually make their first substitutions, he wanted his team’s level of play to go up while the opponent almost always dropped.

And he asked Ava to be one of those who came off the bench.

Initially it was hard. Like any competitive athlete she wanted to be in the top 11. But she was willing to put her personal ambition below her desire for the team to win. She was determined to do her best and raise her team’s level of play whenever she was on the field.

She came off the bench in the national semifinal to score two goals and be named by Proscore as the best female soccer player of all age groups on that day.

In the final, she assisted the game-tying goal in the 90th minute and was one of the five who made her penalty kick in the shootout that sealed the victory.

Pictured is Ava talking to her coach on the field shortly after the final whistle.

When I asked her about the conversation, she said he told her how proud he was of her. How he knew that he had asked her to do something hard and that she had played great.

It’s been said that there is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit. I know that to be true because I learned it from my daughter.