Personal Narrative: My High School Baseball Team

In my town’s Little League, everyone gets a trophy and a high five from the coach. When I decided to try out for my high school’s baseball team, I had the mindset of Little League: you show up and you play.
I arrived at tryouts wearing my school baseball hat. I hadn’t trained over the winter, but because sports are relatively non-competitive at my school, I felt confident I would make the team.
On the last day of tryouts, my coach called my name. “I don’t have room for you on my team,” he said.
It wasn’t just disappointment that I felt. The sport I loved most was the very thing I was being told I wasn’t good enough to play. Baseball has always been a constant in my life. It’s something I talk to my father about and discuss with friends. Baseball is a way to mark the seasons: the excitement of pitchers and catchers reporting at the start of spring and the thrill of the playoffs as the weather grows cool. All these are true, but in trying to explain why I love baseball, there remains an intangible that I can’t identify.
Throughout the next year, I worked hard in classes, became involved in two newspaper publications, and most of all, pursued a bigger role on the robotics team, where I used my interest in math and engineering to help us advance to the state championships.
But I couldn’t let baseball go. Over the winter, I worked to improve my arm strength and bat speed. When tryouts began my sophomore year, I returned to the
gym.
“Congratulations, you made the team,” my coach said at the end of tryouts.
Now, this is the part of the story where I should describe my at-bat in the last inning of the championship game, where I hit the a grand slam, sending the crowd into a frenzy as they lift me onto their shoulders…
It didn’t happen quite that way. I spent my sophomore and junior seasons on the bench. I had a few at bats here and there, but mostly, I kept track of the team’s stats, counted pitches, warmed up the starters between innings, and chewed a lot of bubble gum. During one particular game against our arch rival, it was raining heavily, my team was losing and I felt useless. I had to ask myself: Why am I still doing this?
In my classes and my other extra curricular activities, my hard work had yielded positive results. I had good grades and was chosen for team captain of robotics.
But when it came to baseball, training and trying didn’t necessarily equal success. There was no foolproof formula for getting better at something just because I worked hard and wanted it badly. If this were a math equation, it would be logical to assume that I was making an error in my methodology and begin again with a different method. If I applied my mathematical thinking to baseball, the correct choice would have been to stop playing and focus on my school work and other activities instead. But I was discovering a variable that made it impossible to compute: my love for the game.
As miserable as I might have felt, as badly as I wished for a chance to hit, I still wanted to be on the team. Sometimes you love an activity regardless of how good you are at it. Sometimes you pursue something regardless of how well you succeed.
Last season, during the league championship, I still so badly wanted to be on the field instead of on the bench. But when we won the game and rushed the mound, it was my victory as well. I felt a different kind of satisfaction, one that comes from pursuing something that I love.