Jake Dittenhofer

Favorite Number

“19 has always been my favorite number. In soccer, the player who is a team’s primary playmaker/assist man usually wears 10, and the player who is the center forward/goal scorer usually wears the number 9. A lot of my favorite players growing up wore either of these two numbers. Being wildly overconfident in my abilities from a young age, I thought I could be the best at either of those things, so I just added the numbers together. I remember picking 19 when I was 7 on my first travel team, and picking 19 and wearing it all the way through high school and even in my other sports, such as volleyball or basketball.”