My Story | Cabral Carter

My MLS debut came as a bit of a surprise. It was my first time being rostered for an MLS game. I had been on the bench for Leagues Cup and Concacaf Champions Cup matches, but prior to our trip to Portland in April to play the Timbers I had never dressed for an MLS match. 

Hugo had been given a hard-earned day off, and my friend Thomas Hasal was starting in goal. Because goalkeepers usually don’t get subbed in, I was expecting an afternoon on the bench. Then Thomas broke his nose early in the game.

There I was, sitting on the bench with my feet crossed, admiring the crowd, and the next thing I knew I was checking in.

Two minutes into my debut, we conceded a goal – the first goal that LAFC had allowed all season. Before that moment we had held the record for consecutive clean sheets for the club, and the MLS record for consecutive clean sheets to start a season. And now, two minutes into my debut, we’re down 1-0. Not great. I summoned the mental and emotional tools I had learned over the course of my brief career, and moved forward.

Nine minutes after Portland scored I made a chaotic triple save, which was a confidence-building moment: ‘I'm here. I can handle it.’ We kept our net empty through the 90th minute, but the match ended with a heartbreaking matchwinning goal for Portland at the 90’+4 mark. 

I was devastated. 

I cried in the locker room showers after the game. The staff and the players said that I'd done well. Part of my brain agreed with them, but the other part felt the failure of the first loss of the MLS season, the first goal conceded of the MLS season. I felt responsible for both.

When I got home to LA, my family was waiting for me. It was a powerful moment, to say the least. They're the people who had witnessed all the work that led to my first-team debut. My mom had spent years driving me to training every day – three hours round-trip sometimes – day after day. She didn't get to travel to Portland for my debut. But she was there in spirit, having supported me through all of the mistakes, all of the defeats, through getting cut, through the injuries. To see her as soon as I got home – well, it still makes me emotional months later.

My original debut as a goalkeeper was almost as surprising as my first-team professional debut. I was about nine years old and was playing for a small club called Hollywood FC. My club team’s usual goalie didn’t show up for a match, so I volunteered to pull the gloves on and got out there. A year later, at age 11, I decided I wanted to play soccer at a higher level, and even professionally one day. So my mom did some research and stumbled across this brand-new club that was going to have a professional team one day, called LAFC. They had a 2004 and 2005 academy team. As a kid born in ‘04, that’s all I needed to hear.

To this day, I'm not sure how I got invited to trial. Somehow, I got an invite, trialed at the LAFC Academy, and was blown away by how talented the other boys were.

Fortunately, the coaches saw something in me and kept me around. I adjusted to the level and started to figure a few things out, and after two months of being on trial I was offered a spot in the academy. This was April 2016 -- before there was a first team, a stadium, before the Performance Center was built, before anything.

I was the second goalkeeper ever to be signed for the LAFC Academy. We played our games on the same field where we train now, but it didn’t look nearly as nice back then. When we played against the Galaxy academy, The 3252 would show up with their smoke and chants and drums. That made a huge impact on me. There was no doubt that I was in a more serious environment.

At the time, the academy had two teams, the A team and the B team, and I played most games with the B team. I survived that year of cuts and moved up with the 04s to the U-14 level. I was the third goalkeeper, and I had a tough season. I couldn't adapt well to the full-size goals, the 11-v-11 spaces. I was just a tall, scrawny, skinny kid trying to hang on.

At the end of the year, the academy released me because I needed to play games and I wasn't going to find those games at LAFC Academy. So I found a home at Real SoCal, where I played for six months and then broke my wrist in a match - ironically - against my former LAFC Academy team. Funny enough, Nathan Ordaz, my longtime buddy, collided with me when I was making a triple save. 

I had been performing better – getting games and gaining confidence – but I still felt plenty of self-doubt. Breaking my wrist ended up giving me space to step away and focus on school and on making friends.

While my wrist was in a cast, Real SoCal allowed me to train as a field player. I also trained with my buddies on Fridays after school, just shooting around and having fun. I rediscovered my joy. That was where I really started to gain some momentum, build confidence, and develop. After my wrist healed, the next season I played with the 03s, trained with the 02s, and even played one game with the 01s. Right in the middle of that season – the best season of my life to that point – COVID shut us down. At that point, we were ranked in the top three in the nation as a non-MLS team, which is rare. 

The COVID shutdown ended up being a positive for me, personally. I was fortunate enough that my loved ones weren’t affected, and the time and space away from soccer and school allowed me to discover what I loved. Before the pandemic, I felt myself starting to crash and burn a little bit with AP and honors classes and social life and double days of training. COVID gave me a break. I found new, fun, and creative ways to train. My buddies, my goalkeeper coach and I would drive to Ventura County to jump over fences just to get on a field. 

COVID subsided my junior year, and I had a great season at Loyola High. We didn't concede a single goal in one of the better leagues in California [Mission League]. We ended up going to the CIF final and losing to Mira Costa, 1-0. I gained a lot of experience, then I had a good season with the 03s again at Real SoCal. We advanced to the quarterfinals in ECNL [Elite Club National League]. Those matches gave me even more high-level experience. 

Over those few years, I had come a long way in my development. Right before my senior year, LAFC invited me to return. I’d train with the LAFC Academy during the week, then play matches with the academy and Real SoCal on the weekends. I was in a high-quality developmental environment all the time. In the second half of my senior year, I was invited to train with LAFC’s second team, which was the Las Vegas Lights at that time. It became pretty clear in those six months that I was not yet good enough or ready to be a professional, so I went to college.

(above: University of Pittsburgh, 2024)

I had options to play at incredible academic schools like Cal, Stanford, UCLA, or Brown, but much to my dad's dismay, I turned those opportunities down because I wanted to go somewhere that was going to set me up to play professionally. Pitt - the University of Pittsburgh - ticked that box perfectly. When I went on my visit, I saw how professional the environment was, and how focused Jay Vidovich and the staff were on winning, but also on developing players into professionals. I knew it was the right place for me. In hindsight, it was a crazy decision, but at the time it felt totally aligned with what my gut was telling me. Pitt turned out to be one of the best experiences I've ever had. 

I redshirted my freshman year. The starting goalkeeper that season was Joe van der Sar, the son of Edwin van der Sar [Champions League winner, World Cup veteran, and one of the greatest goalies ever]. My sophomore season, after Joe left, I played pretty much every game. We were young. We struggled. The year before, we had gone to the Final Four, but we lost most of that starting lineup. We were good football-wise, our highlights were phenomenal, but our lowlights were pretty striking as well because we were so young and naive. 

In the first round of the NCAA tournament that year, my first NCAA tournament game, I made a bad mistake in the opening minutes. I made a distribution error and passed to their striker, who scored, and we ended up losing 3-2. I took the blame head-on. Whether my teammates blamed me or not didn't matter. That was a valuable lesson in what overconfidence and naivete can bring about. 

Then in the spring – as I was trying to re-earn the trust of the staff and the team – I found out I had a thumb injury that needed surgery. So I had my UCL [ulnar collateral ligament] repaired in the offseason before my junior season. While I was in my cast, I was doing plyometrics when I landed on a ball and pretty much snapped my ankle. I was a couple microfibers away from needing surgery. My mom had to push me around in a rolling office chair because I couldn't use crutches due to the cast on my hand. That was a terrible summer. I’m very grateful for the Pitt rehab staff, and Jason Han, Daphne Tan, and the HealthFit team, for helping me get back.

About two weeks before my junior season started, I had resumed training, but was still in pain, not in a great headspace, and not feeling confident. The coaches still decided to start me against Georgetown, one of the best teams in the country, in the home opener. I made two really solid saves and we kept a clean sheet, 2-0.

It was one of the happiest days of my life to that point because I had been through a nine-month process of setback after setback.

We went on to have a really strong year. We won the ACC regular season and went to the Elite Eight in the NCAA tournament. The first-round NCAA tournament game was my full circle moment: ‘I remember the error I made last year and I'm going to redeem myself.’ I had my best game of the season. We had a red card in the first half, but gutted out a 1-0 win. It was the culmination of all the grind and hard work of the previous year. Based on that season, LAFC decided I was ready to return.

I signed a one-year contract with the second team [LAFC2], which I completed last year, and then I signed for two years with the first team. This has been my first year of that contract, and it's been a dream come true. I often think back to 11-year-old me, making the decision to play for a more competitive team and then finding my way to this club. Amazingly, 10 years later, almost to the day, I made my MLS debut for that same club. It was such a long journey, and one that wouldn't have been possible without the support of my family. That's why seeing them after the Portland game moved me so deeply.

When I was born my mom chose to sacrifice her career and put her life on hold to raise me while my dad chased his dream and supported our family. Throughout my life, my mom has put everything on the back burner to help me succeed. I’ve always felt like my successes are her successes. 

When I chose to go to Pitt instead of a school that might have set me up better academically, she stood by me. After leaving LAFC as a kid, I could have played for clubs that were closer to home, but she supported me and drove me an hour and a half to Thousand Oaks every day to train for Real SoCal because we thought that playing up, with that coaching staff, was going to help me in the long run. And we were right. She spent countless hours in the car driving me around. She pushed me around in that rolling office chair. The moment we spent together after the Portland match was, for both of us, a moment of saying, ‘It was worth it.’

My dad always tells me that we come from a family of perseverance, and through perseverance we can achieve anything. My story is a story of believing in myself through all the ups and downs. It's a story of not giving up on a childhood dream. Putting in the hours, making the sacrifices necessary to achieve that dream, finding ways to use setbacks as breakthroughs. Most of all it’s a story of perseverance.

Along the way I have learned a few valuable lessons. If one person out there can find any value in these, then it will have been worth sharing them:

1. LIFE IS SHORT

When I was 12 and playing at the LAFC Academy, I had a teammate named Tommy Mark. We were close. On a team comprised mostly of super-talented Latino kids, I was the black kid and he was the white kid. That's how LA is. Diverse. You find your community. Tommy’s younger brother is the same age as my brother, so we would go to Tommy's house and hang out together and watch movies and play in the backyard. When Tommy was 13, he had a heart incident and died in his sleep. 

In our brief time together, Tommy and I used to tell each other, ‘I can’t wait ‘til we’re big time.’ We weren’t the stars of that U-12 team but we had ambition. Tommy was a fantastic player who may very well have made it pro, but he never got the chance to see how far he could go. It was a hard lesson to learn at age 12: Life is finite. It can be long, it can be short, and that's oftentimes out of our control. What is in our control is seizing each opportunity to chase your goals – whatever they might be. 

I wouldn't describe myself as big-time yet, but I’d want Tommy to know: I'm still going. 

2. TRAIN YOUR MIND

During my time at Pitt, we had a sports psychologist named Bernie Holliday who changed my career for the better. Bernie worked with the Pittsburgh Pirates and some other collegiate sports teams, and he held weekly Zoom meetings with us that he designed according to whatever was happening in our season. 

Along with many teachings, Bernie taught us strategies on how to deal with pressure that the Navy SEALs used. They accessed these skills before going into battle so they could handle intense, high-pressure, life-or-death situations when they didn't feel in control. 

Playing goalkeeper in front of thousands of fans is not the same thing as being a SEAL and risking your life, but sometimes the pressure can feel crippling. We learned about visualization and the impact of attainable goal setting, about preparatory breath work and breath work in the moment to calm the nervous system, about positive self-talk and how to frame the way you hear yourself, and about how to reset from mistakes. These tools that I learned working with Bernie have become part of my routine, and greatly helped me be more successful. 

I'm a perfectionist. I chase perfection, even though I know it isn’t achievable. When you’re a perfectionist, failure can hurt really bad. So I had to learn – literally in a classroom on Bernie’s presentation – how to deal with failure, how to prepare myself to handle pressure, how to reset after mistakes. 

Shout out Bernie.

3. ADVICE FROM HUGO

I get asked all the time about the benefits of training with Hugo Lloris, one of the greatest goalkeepers of his generation. Hugo has given me a lot of good advice over the past two years, but his best piece of wisdom has nothing to do with the tactical or technical side of the game.

It was something he said in passing at training one day and it really stuck with me. ‘You can't save them all.’ It surprised me. I responded by jokingly telling him I’m pretty sure he can save them all. But he was right. You can't operate at 100 percent efficiency and effectiveness every day. You can’t save every shot. It’s never going to happen. What you can do is give your best, in any given moment, while accepting that sometimes you’ll come up short and you can't beat yourself up about it.

You can't save them all. 

Get the ball out of your net, reset, and keep going.

4. BIG DREAMS START SMALL

I feel a special sense of love for this club — for the people in the club, for the fans, for The 3252, who came out to watch 11- and 12-year-olds play before there was a stadium, before Carlos [Vela] signed, before anything. This club has always been rooted in its people. I've been fortunate to be one of the people who has been here since the beginning and has fallen in love with it. 

My family attended the groundbreaking day when the stadium was being built. I got to embed my signature and my little 12-year-old handprint in that concrete disk under the stadium. Today, when I walk in the stadium and see all the familiar faces, when I feel the same passion that’s been flowing through this club for 10 years now, I feel at home, like I belong. I feel a responsibility to represent the club that I love and that has loved me.

The same people who were at the club at the very beginning, John [Thorrington], Geoff [Huber], Sean [Kupiec] our trainer – those people were here when LAFC was a concept, and now it's the biggest club in the country.

As big as LAFC has gotten, the people within the club are still humble enough to tell a rookie who gives up the game-winning goal in his debut: ‘It’s OK. We’re good. We got you.’

Back in 2018, LAFC’s first season of competition, I sat up in section 208 with the rest of the academy kids and watched all the games. Today when I run out of the tunnel with the first team for warm-ups, 208 is the first section we can see. What a gift that is. To look up and see how far I've come.