One of my non-school social worlds is baseball. I
played baseball from age five through my senior year of high school, and I now
work as a coach at an indoor facility in the winter time. I would say that I am
more literate in the sport of baseball than I am in any other non-school world.
I have been involved in the sport for sixteen years now, and I can honestly say
that it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far.
For most of my life, baseball was
just something fun to do. It started getting more serious when I was fourteen
and I played on an AAU team. We would travel and play four games every weekend
of the summer. At the end of the summer, we went to Orlando, Florida and played
in the AAU Grand National Championship. That summer was very intense and
certainly revolved around baseball. I was around it constantly, whether it was
playing in one of our eighty games, or watching it on TV. That was the summer
that I became much more serious about the sport, and started to become literate
in baseball.
When AAU was over, I immediately
started high school. I tried out for the freshman baseball team in the spring,
and made it. I was the ace pitcher on the team all year. After that year, I
played on the varsity team for my three remaining years. My senior year, I was
once again the ace pitcher on the team. I was never a good hitter, but in my
career pitching in high school I finished with a 20-8 record. During high
school, my influences were my favorite pitchers, Johan Santana and Tim
Lincecum.
Baseball
is very much a mental sport, in addition to being a physical sport (which
nearly every sport is). There are so many different plays and signs that one needs
to remember, whether you are coaching or playing. There are hundreds of
situations that you have to practice for and need to be ready for at any moment
in a game. To be successful in doing this, you need to master the language of
baseball. This includes getting signs from coaches and other players,
understanding certain situations, learning to make split second decisions as
successfully as possible, and many other things. In addition, like most sports,
you need to play with a certain mindset to be successful. If you go up to the
plate thinking that you won’t be able to hit a pitcher, you will almost always
end up not getting a hit. Pitching is the same way. I always went to the mound
thinking that I could get every single batter out. The few times that I pitched
with a different mindset when I was younger, I ended up pitching terrible
games. Those mental lessons are the most important literacy practices that I
learned in my career playing baseball.
My
ongoing experience around the sport of baseball has impacted my life in so many
ways. It has taught me how much hard work pays off in the end (something that I
have learned in my schooling career many times), and how important team work
can be. I am certain that baseball has made me a better person, and I am
confident that certain people close to me would attest to that. I also believe
that baseball will greatly help my future as a teacher. I have been coaching
players ages 9-17 for three years now, and I know that this experience will
help me interact with my students better when I finally begin my career. It has
taught me many lessons and showed me so many important things to work on and be
aware of when instructing kids and teenagers. These are experiences that I
never would have had if I did not play baseball, and for that reason (upon many
others), I am extremely grateful that I started playing when I was young, and
kept up with it for so long. I met one of my best friends when I was very young
playing baseball, and have met so many other great people over the years.
Baseball taught me a lot about the sport, but more importantly myself, and for
that I will always love baseball.
