That’s a sentiment echoed by team-mate Selina Prieto, 37, who is also evangelical about the power of sport.<\/p>\n
“For me, when I was losing my vision, sport is what saved me. It gave me purpose again. <\/p>\n
“Going blind wasn’t the end of the world. I could still do sport. Sport doesn’t care who you are. Anybody can do it.”<\/p>\n
Prieto was a sprinter before taking up football. She competed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in the T11-12 100m. <\/p>\n
But a knee injury meant she could no longer compete at the highest level in that event, so she switched to football.<\/p>\n
“Going from an individual sport to a team sport was tricky to start off with,” she said. <\/p>\n
“But having team-mates who are now friends, that you can share these experiences with, is quite special.”<\/p>\n
For Prieto, who has a 19-month-old baby, the England call-up was extra special. She wants to show her daughter “that it doesn’t matter how old you are, or what barriers you have, you can still achieve big”.<\/p>\n
“Being a parent and trying to be an elite athlete is hard, but I love it. I want to be the best mum I can, but I also still want to be the best athlete I can, which can be a bit of a juggle at times.<\/p>\n
“I tend to try and train when she’s either at nursery a couple of afternoons a week, or when she’s napping, which are getting less and less as she gets older. But sport is addictive and I just want to do it for as long as possible.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That’s a sentiment echoed by team-mate Selina Prieto, 37, who is also evangelical about the power of sport.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":917138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-917137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=917137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/917137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/917138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=917137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=917137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=917137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}