Ever since I can remember, I've been incredibly athletic. I began playing softball from what seems like the moment I was born and continued to play it all the way through the last game of my senior year of high school. I picked up soccer for a year, was on the volleyball and basketball team in junior high, and picked up sprints and hurdles for track and field in eighth grade. My love was always softball, though.
It shouldn't be surprising that since softball has been there since day one that when high school came, I decided to discontinue playing all of my other sports and instead put all of my energy and efforts into becoming the best softball player I could be. This was especially meaningful to me as a pitcher. Pitching meant training year-round, and if I wanted to be able to bring my team to victory and give the pitchers at our two rival schools a run for their money, I needed to make a commitment to myself and my team in order to be the leader we needed me to be both enthusiastically but also physically.
My senior year season didn't go too well, to be honest. Our team had a rough year mainly because there were approximately three seniors and a handful of juniors, with the rest being underclassmen who had never played at the varsity level before. Thus, we had a young team and understandably didn't go to districts or win even half of our games if I remember correctly. I kept trying as hard as I could to make my pitches count and make my experience on the team boost us to victory, but the young ones were still learning and that made it tough.
When I came to college, I made the decision to discontinue playing softball. Since then, as I work for my school's admissions office, I have frequently been asked by mostly parents of prospective students why, if I loved softball so much, I stopped playing/don't play at my school.
Personally, I get a little offended by that question especially when it's evident by the parent's tone that because I don't play anymore, they think I must not have really been committed to the game. It's as if they're judging my grit and determination without actually getting to know me. As I said, I worked my butt off all through high school, focusing all of my time on the most important sport to me. I spent nearly every day after school starting in October of the school year with my softball coach, throwing pitch after pitch after pitch and continuously filming and critiquing my form and technique, working on resistance training, and overall just growing the calluses on my hands that would take three years to finally wear away. Every Saturday starting in December I spent an hour pitching and an hour in my batting cage doing the same from 9 AM to 11 AM. I was committed as hell.
I chose to not continue playing softball in college because I wanted to focus on my academics. I chose not to keep playing because although I love softball, it was all I'd ever known and I thought that I should take advantage of the other opportunities I have in college to become a more well-rounded individual, instead using my time to devote myself to two on-campus jobs,
Softball will live in my heart forever. Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of the sport I gave my whole self to in every way possible, including mind, body, soul, and spirit. I see the softball players in their uniforms and I watch them walk through our cafeteria with the dirt of the field on their practice pants, hair in ponytails, wearing our school colors and it makes me miss it so freaking much. I do sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had stuck with it through college, but if I had, I wouldn't be the person I am today. That's a sacrifice I'm glad I made.
